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Mrreconcifahh Mecordn ; 



OR, 



enesis and 







THE 



IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS ; 



OR, 



GENESIS AND GEOLOGY. 



BT 



/ 

WILLIAM DENTON, 
vv 




BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM DENTON. 

FOR SALE BT WILLIAM WHITE AND COMPANY, 
158 Washington Street. 

1872. 



IBS 6^1 






THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS; 

OB, 

GENESIS AND GEOLOGY. 



We live in the nineteenth century, when science is 
abroad knocking at every door, not excepting the 
church door ; flashing light into the dark corners of 
superstition and bigotry, regardless of the hooting of 
the owls and the screaming of the bats that inhabit 
them. It is useless to lock and bolt the door ; for 
science carries the club that can demolish every bar- 
rier. In vain you hide in the dark ; for her lamp 
makes day of the blackest night. Build to, the skies, 
she will soar and scan the very top stone ; dig centre 
deep, she will dive to the foundation. Heaven is not 
too high for her fetterless wing, nor the fires of hell hot 
enough to prevent her most searching examination. 

Stimulated by her example, we are no longer con 
tent to crawl at a snail's pace, but have put on the 
" seven-leagued boots," and are striding with the 
pace of a giant. We have left slavery behind us, with 
its terrible curses, — old notions of the earth and 
heavens, which lie like bowlders by the wayside, as we 
still go marching on. It is vain for the cynic to sneer 

3 



4 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

at, the conservative to lament over, or the sceptic to 
deny, the progressive tendency of the age. It is true 
as the sun, and resistless as the motion of the planets. 

Go, bid the ocean cease to heave, 

The rivers cease to flow ; 
Bid smiling spring retrace her steps, 

And flow'rets cease to blow. 
Go, drive the wild winds to their home, 

The lightning; to its nest, — 
Then bid the car of Progress stay, 

Whose coursers never rest. 

This progressive spirit now manifests itself in theo- 
logical investigations which can be no longer postponed. 
We boldly take up to-day what yesterday refused to 
touch. The Bible can no longer say, " You must not 
look at me save to bless. I am too sacred to be in- 
vestigated." For we now say, " What better are you 
than others till you are tested ? All pretended sacred 
books will claim exemption from criticism on the same 
grounds." 

" The Bible," we are told, " is from God. It is all 
true, all divine ; given to man to be his unerring 
guide. He who made the universe made this book ; he 
who wrote his name in blazing suns upon the sky wrote 
this Bible, or inspired men to write it, who infallibly 
recorded what he desired that man should know." 
What might we not expect from it, if put in our hands 
for the first time ? What grand revelations of truth, 
— as much superior to any thing that man can write as 
the solar system is superior to our clumsy machinery 
for representing it ; surpassing man's highest unassisted 
efforts as a living landscape does a picture, or a 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 5 

breathing, moving man his marble representative. 
We say, " It will, perhaps, tell us the story of the 
earth, its fiery birth, and how, during the myriad 
ages, it grew to be the noble tree, whose fruit is living, 
loving men and women. It may inform us of the orbs 
in space, of the universe lying beyond the range of the 
most powerful telescope. It will reveal to us the laws 
of health ; so that we may secure sound bodies, without 
which sound minds are next to impossible. Its reve- 
lations will be as much grander, truer, and more sub- 
lime than man's science, as the laws of nature are 
superior to our knowledge of them ; and, as far as we 
are acquainted with them, we shall find its statements 
exactly to agree." Stand aside, vain babblers, God 
speaks: be silent, listen, and learn. 

We commence with the first verse of the first chap- 
ter of Genesis. "In the beginning, Gcod created the 
heaven and the earth." 

Our knowledge of Nature and her operations compels 
us to object to this. Here is Miracle, whom no man 
knows, taking the place of Nature, with which we are 
all more or less acquainted. Here is the great miracle- 
worker, God, making out of nothing, as the word bara 
is generally supposed to mean, all that exists. Grant 
this, and we have only solved one problem by creating 
a greater. Whence came this wonderful Being, who 
did what in the nature of things seems to be abso- 
lutely impossible ? We cannot help asking, " What 
was he doing for that eternity before he resolved to 
commence the work of creation ? " For there must 
have been an eternity of duration before the begin- 
ning, when there was no heaven, no earth, no any 
thing. When, as the " Rig-Veda " says, — 



6 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

" Nor aught, nor naught, existed : yon bright sky- 
Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above." 

Accept a beginning, and you accept an eternity of 
idleness preceding it, when nothing was done becauso 
there was nothing with which it might be done. A 
solitary monarch for an eternity, considering the sort 
of kingdom he should make, and how that kingdom 
rule. 

We can conceive of a boundary to the solar system, 
but none to the universe. So we can conceive of a 
beginning to the solar system, but none to the matter 
of which it is composed ; and, when we are introduced 
to a beginning, it is as unnatural as for some one to 
take us out of the universe, and introduce us to its 
commencement. 

As far as we can see, the universe is self-sufficient. 
It does not need winding up by some outside power, 
like a clock, neither did it require some one to make it 
originally ; and only ignorance of the operation of 
natural law ever led any one to talk of a " beginning," 
or dream of a God who stands outside of nature, and 
makes all things by days' works. 

But when was this beginning ? One modern would- 
be harmonizer of Genesis and geology assures us that 
" there is here no limitation of time, and, therefore, 
the expansion of astronomical and geological eons, 
cycle upon cycle, finds here the most ample scope. 
There was time enough in that ' beginning' for the 
evolution of the entire solar system from a single 
nebulous mass, — supposing that to have been the 
condition in which matter was first produced."* But 

* Man in Genesis and Geology, p. 13. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 7 

this gentleman finds it convenient to forget that God 
himself — taking his view of the Bible — has declared, 
in the plainest possible language, when this beginning 
was. The creation of heaven was the work of the 
second day, — " God called the firmament heaven;" 
and we read in Exod. xx. 11 : " For in six days the 
Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that 
in them is ; " and in Exod. xxxi. 17 : " In six days the 
Lord made heaven and earth ; and on the seventh day 
he rested, and was refreshed." Whatever heaven and 
earth mean in the one place, we may reasonably con- 
clude they mean in the other. But if God made 
heaven and earth in six days, then the beginning, in 
which he is said to have made them, must be included 
in those six days ; for if not, then he did not make the 
heaven and earth in six days, as this passage informs 
us. 

When we have learned that the heaven and earth 
were made in six days, we have a key to the time of 
the " beginning." On the last of these six days, Adam 
was created ; and, in the fifth and sixth chapters of 
Genesis^ we can learn how many years it is from the 
creation of Adam to the Deluge. Adam was one hun- 
dred and thirty years old when Seth was born ; Seth 
was one hundred and five when Enos was born ; and 
thus we are furnished with the date of the birth of 
eight succeeding individuals to Noah, who was six 
hundred years old when the Deluge came. Thus wq 
have the following table : — 

Adam ...,.•••• 130 

Seth 105 

Enos 90 

Cainan • 70 



8 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

Mahalaleel 65 

Jared 162 

Enoch 65 

Methuselah 187 

Lamech ........ 182 

Noah 600 

Total 1,656 yrs. 

The time from the creation of Adam to the Deluge, 
then, is one thousand six hundred and fifty-six years ; 
and from that time the Bible furnishes us with dates, 
by which we learn that the Deluge took place about 
four thousand two hundred years ago. Then the 
creation of man took place, according to the Bible 
statement, less than six thousand years ago ; and 
" heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is," 
were created in less than a week before the creation 
of man ; and this was the " beginning." 

But who does not know that this is false ? Owen 
says, very justly, that the age of our planet alone, as 
indicated by geology, is " a period of time so vast, that 
the mind, in the endeavor to realize it, is strained by 
an effort like that by which it strives to conceive the 
space dividing the solar system from the most distant 
nebulae."* It would be just as true to say that the 
universe is but six thousand miles in diameter, as to 
say that it is but six thousand years old. Dr. Buck- 
land, himself a clergyman of the Church of England, 
says, " Many extensive plains and massive mountains 
form, as it were, the great charnel-house of preceding 
generations, in which the petrified exuviae of extinct 
races of animals and plants are piled into stupendous 

* Owen's Palaeontology, p. 2. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 9 

monuments of the operations of life and death, during 
almost immeasurable periods of time." Again lie says, 
" The truth is, that all observers, however various may 
be their speculations respecting the secondary causes 
by which geological phenomena have been brought 
about, are now agreed in admitting the lapse of 
very long periods to have been an essential condition 
to the production of these phenomena." Lyell talks of 
" myriads of ages " * of geologic time. Prof. Sedge- 
wick of Cambridge, England, says, " During the 
evolution of countless succeeding ages, mechanical and 
chemical laws seem to have undergone no change ; but 
tribes of sentient beings were created, and lived their 
time upon the earth." f Prof. Hitchcock of Amherst 
says, " The globe must have existed during a period 
indefinitely long anterior to the creation of man. We 
are not aware that any practical and thorough geol- 
ogist doubts this, whatever are his views in respect to 
revelation." £ No geologist pretends to speak of less 
than millions of years for the time during which the 
various formations that constitute the crust of the 
earth were deposited. 

As geology demonstrates the great age of the earth, 
so astronomy equally establishes the great age of the 
heavenly bodies. Herschell, with his forty-feet tele- 
scope, saw nebulae whose light, he calculated, must 
have travelled for nearly two millions of years before 
it reached our planet. § The nebulae must, therefore, 
have been in existence nearly two millions of years 
before, for their light thus to reach the earth. 

* Lyell's Principles of Geology, p. 63. 

f Discourse on the Studies of the IMversity of Cambridge. 

% Geology and Revelation, p. 22. 

§ Dr. Pye Smith on Geology, Phil. Trans., 1800. 



10 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

But, in reply to this, we are told by theologians, who 
admit the great age of the heaven and earth, that the 
days mentioned in Exodus, as also the creative days of 
Genesis, were not days of twenty-four hours each, but 
periods of time of vast extent. Hugh Miller, in his 
" Testimony of the Rocks," says, " I have been com- 
pelled to hold that the days of creation were not natural, 
but prophetic days, and stretched far back into the 
bygone eternity. That is, the facts of geology had 
"compelled " him to give a meaning to the word " day" 
that he would never have thought of giving to it other- 
wise. Nearly all would-be harmonizers of Genesis 
and geology are now " compelled" to take the same 
view, and make the word " day " cover a period mil- 
lions of years in extent. 

" Day," we are told, does not always mean a period 
of twelve or twenty-four hours. Very true ; and how 
do we know when it means that, and when it means 
something else ? By the way in which it is employed. 
If a man says, " I have seen nothing like it in my 
day," you understand him to mean that he has seen 
nothing like it during his life ; but if he says, " I made 
that table in three days, commencing each day in the 
morning and leaving off in the evening," who could 
dream that he meant three years or thirty years ? And 
who could consider him a truthful man if he did ? 

On the face of it, an interpretation that makes the 
word " day," in the first chapter of Genesis, mean an 
immense period of time, is strained and unnatural. 
" The evening and the morning were the first day." 
But how could the evening and the morning be a 
period of millions of years' duration ? How could it be 
paid with any propriety or truth, " In six days the Lord 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. U 

made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them 
is, and rested the seventh day : wherefore God blessed 
the seventh day and hallowed it," if each of the six 
days were millions of years long, and the seventh evi- 
dently a natural day of twenty-four hours ? Exod. 
xxxi. 17, must be read to signify, " In six periods, 
millions of years long, the Lord made heaven and 
earth ; and on the seventh period, of twenty-four 
hours long, he rested and was refreshed ! " The 
time of rest is out of all proportion small to the time 
of labor ; and why should the same word, used in the 
same connection, mean in the first part* of the verse 
millions of years, and in the last part only twenty-four 
hours ? Hugh Miller, in order to escape this difficulty, 
represents the seventh day as still continuing. " Over 
it," he says, " no evening is represented in the record as 
falling, for its special work is not yet complete." * But 
the Bible says expressly, God " rested" and God blessed 
the seventh day, because he had "rested" not rests; 
and by this rest he " was refreshed; " not, he is being 
refreshed, as it ought to have been, if God's sabbath 
still continues. But Hugh Miller knew, as every geo- 
logist knows, that the process of world-making is as 
truly going on to-day as it did during the geologic 
ages. And, if God worked then, he works now, and 
manifests no disposition to rest and refresh himself. 

That an ordinary day was meant is evident from the 
amount of work done on some of these days. All 
that God is represented as doing on the third day is to 
say, " Let the waters under the heaven be gathered 
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear." 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 210. 



12 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

And God called the dry land " earth," and the gather- 
ing of the waters "seas;" then he said, "Let the earth 
bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit- 
tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself 
upon the earth." In both cases, after God had spoken, the 
work is represented as being immediately done, — " it 
was so." Omnipotence called, and the world answered. 
In the 33d Psalm, we read in reference to the creation 
in general, and this day's work in particular, " He 
spake, and it was done ; he commanded, and it stood 
fast." But, if these days are to represent the geologic 
periods, they must have been millions of years long. 
"Upward of sixteen millions of years are supposed to 
have elapsed since the creation of life upon the earth," 
says Dr. Anderson in his " Course of Creation." No 
geologist can consider the Silurian period as separated 
from our own by any less time than many millions of 
years ; and yet no interpretation carries it back earlier 
than the second day. This second day, then, could not 
have been less than a period of two millions of years ; 
and yet, according to this record, all that God did 
during this immense period was to utter two sentences 
and the two words " earth " and " seas." We thus have 
half a million years for each sentence, and half a million 
for each word ; or counting the words in Hebrew, the 
language which God is supposed to have employed, we 
have twenty-five words, and eighty thousand years for 
God to utter each word! Who cannot see that an 
interpretation of the word " day " that involves such 
an absurdity as this must be false ? 

In favor of the idea that day means an indefinite 
period of time, we are sometimes told, that, in Gen. ii. 
4, the work that is said to have been done in six days 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 13 

in the first chapter is said to have been done in a day. 
; 'In the day that the Lord God made the earth and 
the heavens-." But the fact is, we have here a different 
account of creation, by another person, who could 
probably see no reason why Omnipotence should work 
six days ; and he, therefore, teaches that the work of 
creation was done in one day. This second writer 
always calls the Creator Lord God (Jehovah) : whereas 
the first always says God, or, as it might hafe been 
more properly translated, Gods (Elohim) ; and this 
second account of creation is in many other respects 
quite different from the first. 

Before theologians were, like Hugh Miller, " com- 
pelled " to elongate the Genesical days, they acknowl- 
edged that neither the Hebrew nor common sense 
would admit of any such interpretation of the word 
" day " as they now give it. 

Thus Hitchcock says, " There is no evidence that 
the word ' day ' is used figuratively in the first chapter 
of Genesis, as it is in all other places in Scripture 
where it means an indefinite period, except, perhaps, 
Gen. ii. 4. On the contrary, the Mosaic description 
of the creation appears to be a very simple and per- 
fectly literal history, adapted to the most uncultivated 
minds. ... a It seems from Gen. ii. 5, compared 
with Gen. i. 11, 12, that it had not rained on the earth 
till the third day. If the days were only of twenty-four 
hours, this would be very probable, but altogether 
absurd if they were long periods. Such a meaning is 
forced and unnatural, and, therefore, not to be adopted 
without a very urgent necessity." * A " forced and un- 

* Hitchcock's Geology (1853), pp. 294, 295. 



14 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

natural " meaning, then, may be given when there is 
a " very urgent necessity ; " and this is what Hugh 
Miller and other harmonizers have felt. 

Granville Penn says, speaking of geologists who 
enlarge the creative days, "- Their theories oblige them 
to seek for much larger measures of time than the 
historian supplies ; . . . and therefore they must obtain 
that length of time, somehoiv or other, from the text 
of Moses." He adds, " It remains for us to conclude, 
with Rosenmuller, upon every ground of sound learn- 
ing, criticism, and philosophy, ' that we are to under- 
stand natural days ; each of which, commencing from 
one evening, is terminated by the next, in which man- 
ner the Jews, and many others of the most ancient 
nations, reckoned days.'' " * 

In the early editions of " Comstock's Geology " — it 
has been dropped from the later — was the following 
letter from Moses Stuart, who was professor of sacred 
literature in the theological seminary of Andover. He 
was a good Hebrew scholar, and wrote a grammar of 
that language. 

" The inquiries you make concerning the word yam 
in Gen. i., I will briefly answer. It does not sig- 
nify an indefinite period of time, but always some 
definite one, when employed, as it is in Gen. i., in the 
singular number. It sometimes means a specific day 
of the week ; sometimes to-day, that is, this day ; some- 
times a specific day, or season of calamity, joy, par- 
ticular duty, action, suffering, etc. It is only the 
plural, yarnin, which is employed for time in an 
indefinite way, as, l in many days to come,' l days of my 

* Mineral and Mosaical Geologies, pp. 162, 163. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 15 

life,' &c. But, even here, the plural in most cases is 
a limited one, — limited by some adjective, numeral, 
&c. ; and yamin signifies, therefore, a limited portion 
of time ; often it stands for a year. . . . When the 
sacred writer in Gen. i. says, the first day, the second 
day, &c, there can be no possible doubt — none, 1 
mean, for a philologist, let a geologist think as he may 
— that a definite day of the week is meant, which 
definite day is designated by the numbers first, second, 
third, &c. What puts this beyond all question in 
philology is, that the writer says specifically, The even- 
ing and the morning were the first day, the second 
day, etc. Now, is an evening and a morning a period 
of some thousands of years ? Is it in any sense, when 
so employed, an indefinite period ? The answer is so 
plain and certain that I need not repeat it. . . . If 
Moses has given us an erroneous account of the crea- 
tion, so be it. Let it come out ; and let us have the 
whole. But do not let us turn aside his language to 
get rid of difficulties that we may have in our specu- 
lations." 

That is honest, that is manly : he meets the subject 
fairly, nor attempts to dodge the responsibilities. 
Stuart was not, however, a geologist, or he would 
have known that it was not to get rid of difficulties 
that Bible geologists had in their " speculations," that 
they resorted to this forced and unnatural definition 
of days, but to get rid of difficulties that facts, incon- 
trovertible facts, presented. 

If " day" means an indefinite period, in the first chap- 
ter of Genesis, — and this is the meaning put upon it 
by Bible geologists ; for none of them pretend to settle 
whether it means exactly two, ten, or twenty million 



16 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

years, — why six of them? One indefinite period is 
just as long as six. And, as the geologist very well 
knows, there are no six periods in the world's history 
into which it may be divided any more readily than 
into ten, or a still greater number. Lyell reckons 
fourteen principal groups of rocks, formed during 
fourteen successive periods, and thirty-five subordinate 
groups, representing as many periods.* Hitchcock 
enumerates ten principal geologic periods. f 

If each day consisted of an evening and a morning, 
as this writer represents, and a day was a period mil- 
lions of years in duration, then there must have been a 
period of darkness about as long as the period of light. 
How could the plants made on the third day survive 
this million years' night ? Or if evening and morning 
mean a period of rest and a period of action, as some 
have suggested, then there must have been immensely 
long periods during which nothing was being accom- 
plished. How is it that the rocks furnish no record of 
them ? And if God rested a million years between 
every creative act, what need was there of a seventh 
day rest ? 

" In the beginning," then, was but five thousand 
eight hundred and seventy-four years ago ; and thus 
the first verse of the Bible demonstrates that the book 
has had an entirely false estimate put upon it, and 
that one of its writers, at least, was entirely ignorant 
of what he professed to teach. 

Some geologists, to harmonize this first chapter of 
Genesis w r ith geology, supposed — and some theolo- 
gians still suppose — that between the beginning 
spoken of in the first verse of Genesis, and the chaotic 

* Manual of Elementary Geology, pp. 104-107. 
f Hitchcock's Geology, pp. 98-100. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 17 

condition described in the second verse, there was an 
undescribed epoch of immense duration, during which 
all the forms existed whose remains are found in the 
rocks ; and that by some grand convulsion all life was 
destroyed, and the world reduced to chaos, out of 
which it was brought, and into its present state, in six 
literal days, as the account in the first chapter of 
Genesis states. This is one of the straws clutched by 
drowning theologians to save them from acknowledging 
the unscientific, and especially the ungeologic, char- 
acter of this Genesical cosmogony. Chalmers, Buck- 
land, Sedgewick, Conybeare, Dr. Pye Smith, and 
Hitchcock harmonized after this fashion, which sup- 
poses a multitude of creations, during millions of years, 
for no purpose whatever, and of which the Bible is 
entirely silent ; and an entire destruction of all beings 
that existed previous to the six days' creation, about 
six thousand years ago. Dr. Pye Smith, indeed, con- 
ceived that it was only a small part of the earth's 
surface that was brought into a chaotic state, and 
upon which the work of the six days was expended, in 
" adjusting and finishing its surface for most glorious 
purposes." He thus expresses himself, — 

" This region was first, by atmospheric and geologi- 
cal causes of previous operation, under the will of the 
Almighty, brought into a condition of superficial ruin, 
or some kind of general disorder, probably by volcanic 
agency ; it was submerged, covered with fogs and 
clouds, and subsequently elevated, and the atmosphere, 
by the fourth day, rendered pellucid." * Why did he 
not conclude by saying, " Now all this was done that 

* Scripture and Geology, p. 275. 



18 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Moses, 
saying " — . The Soul of the universe playing such 
fantastic tricks in some obscure corner, and then 
trumpeting forth such an utterly false story as this 
concerning them ! It is, however, in some respects, a 
very convenient explanation ; for, since the spot can- 
not be found where this took place, who can deny it ? 
When Baron Munchausen affirmed his hatchet flew to 
the moon, he said those that did not believe it might go 
to the moon and see ; and those who do not believe the 
Rev. Doctor's statement may find the spot where this 
took place, — or did not take place, — and contradict 
him. If but a portion of the earth, it may have been 
a small ten-mile valley ; the darkness, a fog produced 
by its stream ; the formation of light, the day that dis- 
pelled the fog ; and the creation of the sun, moon, and 
stars, merely their appearance in fair weather. This 
pretended explanation is too silly for serious consider- 
ation, and, in reference to any other subject, would be 
laughed at by every sensible person. 

Hugh Miller once held the idea of a great blank 
between the first and second verses in Genesis, but, as 
he says, was " compelled to.arrive " at a very different 
conclusion. He says, " It is a great fact, now fully 
established in the course of geological study, that be- 
tween the plants which in the present time cover the 
earth, and the animals that inhabit it, and the animals 
and plants of the later extinct creation, there occurred 
no break or blank, but that, on the contrary, many of 
the existing organisms were contemporary, during the 
morning of their being, with many of the extinct ones 
during the evening of theirs. We know, further, that 
not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 19 

and several, even, of the wild animals which continue 
to survive amid our tracts of hills and forest, were in 
existence many ages ere the human race began. In- 
stead of dating their beginning only a single natural 
day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, 
they must have preceded him by many thousands of 
years. . . . The present creation was not cut off 
abruptly from the preceding one ; but, on the contrary, 
it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points. We 
are led, also, to know that any scheme of reconcilia- 
tion which would separate between the recent and 
the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and 
darkness is a scheme which no longer meets the 
necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate 
forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the 
progress of geological discovery.'' * 

Prof. Dawson of Montreal says, " Geology testifies 
to the gradual introduction of existing forms, species 
by species, and to the similar gradual extinction of 
previous forms ; and the modern world is connected 
by one unbroken chain of organic existence with those 
pre-Adamite worlds which have passed away." f 

Ascending from the early Tertiary beds, which are 
certainly separated from our own time by more than 
a million years, we find the number of living forms 
increasing at every step ; so that the geologic past 
is only separated from the present by such a gap as 
time by its gradual changes has produced. 

" In the European Eocene," says Dana, " the fossils 
are all of extinct species ; in the Miocene, fifteen to 
twenty per cent are living; in the older Pliocene, 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 148. f Archaia, p. 364. 



20 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

forty to fifty per cent ; in the newer Pliocene, Norwich 
Crag, ninety per cent." * One by one new forms 
come in, as the stars appear in the evening sky ; the 
living species increasing at every step, as they ap- 
proach nearer and nearer to man. There could, 
therefore, have been no such chasm of death, separat- 
ing man and other living forms from the extinct 
species of the previous ages, as these harmonizers 
imagine. 

" And the earth was without form and void; and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit 
of God moved upon the face of the waters" — 2d verse. 

According to this, the primitive condition of our 
planet was one in which it was without form, or, in 
other words, without shape, and void or empty. We 
can very readily see that there never was a time w T hen 
the world was without shape ; for the law of gravita- 
tion, which gives it its present shape, must be as old 
as matter. There never, could have been a time when 
the world was empty ; for this the pressure of the mat- 
ter composing the earth must have prevented. But 
we are told that the Hebrew words, tohu va bohu, are 
not correctly translated without form and void : they 
should have been translated " desolate and empty," 
— that is, without an inhabitant. But what an un- 
fortunate thing it is, that God should have written 
his word in a language that never was spoken by more 
than two or three millions of people at one time, and 
hundreds of millions of people, speaking other lan- 
guages, should be compelled to depend on blundering 
translators, or master the intricacies of a dead lan- 
guage. 

* Dana's Manual of Geology, p. 524. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 21 

Granting the accuracy of this new translation, wo 
have a world submerged by water, surrounded by 
utter darkness, and the spirit of God, or, as the 
original may mean, a mighty wind, moving over the 
face of the waters. It is now all but demonstrated 
that the original condition of our planet was that 
of a fiery, fluid mass. Prof. James D. Dana, profes- 
sedly a Christian, says, " The fact of the existence 
of the globe at one time in a state of universal 
fusion is placed beyond reasonable doubt." * Even 
Hugh Miller says, " I must continue to hold, with 
Humboldt and with Hutton, with Playfair and 
with Hall, that this solid earth was at one time, from 
the centre to the circumference, a mass of molten 
matter." f Mantell informs us, that, " from astronom- 
ical observations, the original crust of the earth is 
supposed to have been a superficial coating of solidified 
matter, produced by the cooling of the surfaces of an 
incandescent fluid globe." J Agassiz states, that " Our 
knowledge carries us far enough to warrant the asser- 
tion that there was a time when our earth was in a 
state of igneous fusion, when no ocean bathed it, and 
no atmosphere surrounded it, when no wind blew over 
it, and no rain fell upon it, but an intense heat held 
all its materials in solution. "§ In this belief of the 
earth's original fiery condition, agree nearly all geol- 
ogists and astronomers. 

There could, therefore, have been no water covering 
its surface, and no darkness upon its face ; and the 
writer could scarcely have more utterly failed to de« 



* Manual of Geology, p. 134. J Wonders of Geology, p. 31. 

t Lectures on Geology, p. 296. § Geological Sketches, page 2. 



22 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

scribe the original condition of the earth, had he 
known its real condition, and undertaken to describe 
its opposite. Many millions of years, indeed, must 
have passed after the formation of the earth, before 
water could rest upon its surface, on account of its 
extreme heat. 

"And God said, Let there be light, and there was 
light. And God saw the light, that it was good ; and 
God divided the light from the darkness. And God 
called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night ; 
and the evening and the morning were the first day." — 
3d, 4th, and 5th verses. 

Had such statements been made in any other pro- 
fessedly sacred book, Christians would have regarded 
them as sufficient to settle beyond all controversy the 
fallible character of the book in which they were 
recorded. Light made before the sun, the luminous 
centre from which it proceeds. Day before the revo- 
lution of the earth upon its axis ; for how could the 
earth revolve before the sun, whose influence alone 
enables it to revolve, had an existence ? 

How could the earth exist for three days before the 
sun, which we have the best of reason to believe is its 
parent ? What should we think of a biography in 
which the writer informed us, that, when the subject 
was three years old, his father was born, and, when he 
was thirty years old, his grandfather came into exist- 
ence ? We would laugh, of course. But it is now 
almost universally acknowledged that the sun is the 
parent of the planets, and consequently of the earth. 
Our dependence upon the sun is greater than that of 
a child on a parent. A boy lives when his father dies ; 
but blot out the sun, and the earth would at once 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 23 

cease to exist. The earth's dependence upon the sun 
is as absolute as that of the day : let the sun expire, 
and both would cease ; and before it existed they 
never could have been. 

" G-od saw the light, that it was good." 

Was this, then, the first time that he had beheld it? 
If not, why tell us that he saw it, and that it was 
good ? If this was the first time, he must have dwelt 
in eternal darkness : no wonder that he thought the 
light was good ; but it does seem a wonder that he 
did not try the experiment before. 

" Grod divided the light from the darkness" 

Previous to this time, then, they must have been 
united. What kind of light could it have been while 
it was united with darkness ? But darkness, as we 
know, is merely produced by the absence of light. 

It would have been just as correct to have said, " And 
God said, Let there be heat, and there was heat. And 
God felt the heat that it was good ; and God divided 
the heat from the cold. And he called the heat Fire, 
and the cold he called Frost." No New-England boy, 
of twelve years of age and ordinary intelligence, would 
write such nonsense as this. Wherever light exists, it 
is light, and wherever absent it is darkness ; and, in the 
nature of things, it must ever have been so. 

u Grod called the light Day, and the darkness he called 
Night." 

To whom did he call them ? what need was there 
to call them any thing? When man comes, he will 
speak, and give them such a name as pleases him. 

What constituted the day before the sun was in 
existence ? The man who wrote the account probably 
had some idea on the subject that seemed rational to 



24 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

him, however absurd in the light of science it may 
seem to us. To get at his idea, we need to consider 
the singular notions that obtained previous to the 
advent of astronomy. The writer of the first chapter 
of Genesis does not appear to have thought that the 
sun was the cause of the day. The light and the 
darkness were divided before its existence ; the light 
occupied one half of space, and the darkness the other 
half. These revolved over the earth, — the darkness 
and the light, — " the evening and the morning ; " the 
light being the day, which the sun was made to rule, 
as the moon was made to rule the night, or the dark- 
ness. 

Ambrose, a celebrated Father of the Christian 
Church in the fourth century, says, * " We must 
recollect that the light of day is one thing ; the light 
of the sun, moon, and stars another, — the sun by his 
rays appearing to add lustre to the daylight. For 
before sunrise the day dawns, but is not in full reful- 
gence ; for the mid-day sun adds still further to its 
splendor." However childish such notions appear 
now, while scripture astronomy was taught and the 
facts were unknown, they were doubtless quite com- 
mon. 

"And Gfod said, Let there be a firmament in the midst 
of the waters, and let it divide the ivaters from the 
waters." — 6th verse. 

The word Rakia, here translated firmament, is thus 
defined by Gesenius in his Hebrew lexicon. " The 
firmament, the expanse, of the heavens, which is spread 
out, expanded, like a hemispheric arch above the 

* Quoted by C. W. Goodwin in Essays and Reviews. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 25 

earth ; splendid and transparent as sapphire, in which 
the stars are said to be fixed, and above which the 
Hebrews supposed a celestial ocean to exist." It is 
derived from a word signifying to spread out, or expand 
by beating. It divided the waters above from the 
waters beneath, and must, therefore, have been a solid 
vault. In Job xxvi. 11, it is said to have pillars, — 
" The pillars of heaven tremble." It had, as other 
Jewish writers teach us, " foundations" and " doors" 
(see 2 Sam. xxii. 8, and Ps. lxxviii. 23). The writer 
of the Book of Job says, " Hast thou with him spread 
out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking- 
glass ?" (Job xxx-vii. 18.) In Isa. xliv. 24, we read, 
" I am the Lord, that stretcheth forth the heavens 
alone." On the upper side of it God's throne is 
placed (Ez. i. 22-26), and from it God looks down (Isa. 
lxiii. 15) ; at times he shakes the heavens (Hag. ii. 6), 
— which, of course, he could easily do by stamping 
with his foot, — and stars fall from it upon the earth, 
" as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is 
shaken of a mighty wind" (Rev. vi. 13). In God's 
fury, he will roll up the heavens " as a scroll ; and all 
their host shall fall down, as a leaf falleth off from the 
vine, and as a falling fig from the fig-tree " (Isa. xxxiv. 

4). 

Hitchtfock acknowledges that the Bible is written 
in conformity with such ideas. He says, " It was the 
opinion of the ancients that the earth, at a certain 
height, was surrounded by a transparent, hollow sphere 
of solid matter, which they called the firmament. 
Where rain descended, they supposed it was through 
windows, or holes, made in this crystalline curtain 
suspended in mid-heaven. To these notions the Ian* 



26 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

guage of the Bible is frequent!// conformed" * Of 
course, because its writers did not know any better ; 
but, in the light of astronomy, how absurd is all this ! 
There is, as we know, no solid vault, no stars set in it, 
therefore no throne of God placed upon it ; there 
can be no shaking of the firmament, for there is none 
to shake ; and the stars could no more fall upon the 
earth than a thousand haystacks could fall upon the 
point of a pin. 

Such were the ideas, generally, of the people of that 
age. The Greeks believed that the blue sky was a 
solid crystal sphere, to which the sun, moon, and stars 
were fixed, and which was constantly revolving. When 
it was discovered that some of the heavenly bodies had 
independent motions, they were supposed to be attached 
to other spheres, and seen through the nearer trans- 
parent spheres ; but they do not appear to have believed 
that an ocean of water existed above the crystal sphere, 
as the writer of the first chapter of Genesis and the 
Bible writers generally did. The question naturally 
arose in the Jewish mind, How does the rain fall, seeing 
that the firmament or heaven beneath the water is 
solid ? And the answer was, There are windows in it ; 
and when God wishes it to rain, his place of abode 
being on that side of the firmament, he opens the 
windows, and, of course, the water cannot do other- 
wise than fall. Thus, when God wished to drown the 
world, we are told (Gen. vii. 11), that, " the windows 
of heaven were opened ; " and when the deed was done, 
and God desired the land to appear on which to try 
his new experiment, we are informed (Gen. viii. 2), 

• Religion of Geology, p. 9. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 27 

that "the windows of heaven were stopped." What 
a clumsy explanation of rain ! And yet we are told 
that the Soul of the universe dictated such childish 
nonsense ; and some scientific men are solemnly 
engaged in trying to transmute such base metal into 
the sterling coin of heaven. Alas, poor alchemists ! 
you search in vain for the philosopher's stone by 
which such a miracle may be performed. 

After the Deluge, the people of the earth undertook 
to build a tower whose top should " reach unto 
heaven." This is not at all surprising, since their 
views coincided with the views of the writer. Heaven 
could not be very high ; and, had it not been for the 
misfortune that befell them, they might have reached 
it. But the Lord seems to have been of the same 
opinion ; and, to prevent them from scaling his abode, 
he confounded their language, so that they could not 
understand each other's speech ! 

"And Grod said, Let the waters under the heaven he 
gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land 
appear ; and it was so." — 9th verse. 

If the law of gravitation then operated, and without 
it the earth could not have existed, the waters must 
have flowed to the lowest places, and this whether they 
were " let" or not: and if, by this flowing, they covered 
all the land, as is here indicated, the land could only 
be made to appear when the waters were gathered 
together, by heaping them above their true level; and, 
as soon as the miraculous power was withdrawn by 
which it was done, the water would cover the land as 
before. The only way to u let the dry land appear," 
if it was covered with water, would be to elevate the 
land ; but of this the writer never seems to have 



28 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

dreamed. He thought, as I remember thinking when 
a boy, that the sea is higher than the land, and I won- 
dered what kept it from overflowing. 

Tins represents the water and land as separated at 
once, and so continuing ; and this less than six thousand 
years ago. But geology shows us that the land surface 
of the globe has been increasing since a very early 
period, and that sea and land have changed places 
many times ; so that, instead of this being done in a 
day, or recently, it took innumerable ages to accomplish 
it, and it is still going on. 

The conclusions arrived at by geologists are well 
presented by Dana. " The continents, while still 
beneath the waters, began to take shape. Then, as 
the seas deepened, the first dry land appeared, low, 
barren, and lifeless. Under slow intestine movements, 
and the concurrent action of the enveloping waters, 
the dry land expanded, strata formed, and, as these 
processes went on, mountains by degrees rose, each in 
its appointed place. Finally, in the last stage of the 
development, the Alps, Pyrenees, and other heights, 
received their majestic dimensions, and the continents 
were finished to their very borders." * The oceans 
were, of course, formed by a similar gradual process, 
which occupied periods of vast duration. 

J. P. Lesley, well known as one of our best practi- 
cal geologists, says, " The fact is, that no fixed relation 
of land and water has ever been established for the 
surface of the globe. From the beginning, land and 
water have been exchanging places. Every acre of 
the land-surface of the earth, which geology has 

* Dana's Manual of Geology, p. 739. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 29 



examined, bears indubitable marks of having been 
not simply overflowed, but actually created at the 
bottom of the ocean." He adds, " Every part of every 
coast of every ocean is either rising slowly from the 
waters or sinking slowly into them." * 

Agassiz makes a similar statement : " There was an 
age in the physical history of the earth when the 
lands consisted of low islands, when neither great 
depths nor lofty heights diversified the surface of the 
earth." Then he tells us, " The patches of land 
already raised above the water became so united as to 
form large islands. . . . The size of the islands, their 
tendency to coalesce by the addition of constantly 
increasing deposits, and thus to spread into wider 
expanses of dry land, marked the advance towards the 
formation of continents ; " then, " Great mountains 
bound together in everlasting chains the islands which 
had already grown to continental dimensions." f 

Instead of the continents being formed in a day, 
about six thousand years ago, they have been forming 
since the azoic period, and are not even finished yet. 

The ignorance of this Elohistic writer of Genesis is, 
however, no greater than that of many of his biblical 
successors. In the 126th Psalm, we read, " To him 
that stretched out the earth above the waters; " and 
in the 24th Psalm, " The earth is the Lord's : " " he 
hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon 
the floods." The Jews are told, in the Ten Command- 
ments, that they are not to make the likeness of any 
thing that is in the water under the earth, — a very 



* Man's Origin and Destiny, p. 48. 
f Geological Sketches, pp. 123-125. 



30 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

needless command indeed. The writer of the flood- 
story could not see much difficulty in drowning the 
world, with an ocean above it, and another below it : 
the windows of heaven were opened, and let the one 
down, and "the fountains of the great deep were broken 
up " (Gen. vii. 11), and the waters of the other over- 
flowed even the highest mountains! But the under- 
ground ocean has no more existence than the over- 
ground ocean ; and the interior of our planet is widely 
different from the representations of these Jewish 
writers. 

On the same day that the land and water were 
divided, we are informed that " God said. Let the 
earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the 
fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in 
itself upon the earth ; and it was so" — 11th verse. 

According to this statement, the first organic exist- 
ences on this planet were grass, herbs, and fruit-trees, 
and they made their appearance less than six thousand 
years ago. Nothing could be much farther from the 
truth. If it had said that they were the last created, 
it would have been much nearer. The lowest rocks in 
which fossils are found abound with animal remains ; 
and fruit-trees do not appear for vast ages after this, 
nor true grasses. 

Let us hear the testimony of geology. " The 
Mosaic history represents the vegetable kingdom to 
have been created on the third day : but an examina- 
tion of the rocks shows us that animals were created 
as early as vegetables ; they are found in the lowest 
rocks which contain any remains of organized beings. 
We should expect to find the remains of the plants 
which flourished during that long third day ; but there 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 31 

is, at least, no evidence that the coal vegetation answers 
to this description." * The evidence of Hitchcock is 
very similar ; and no man could be more anxious to 
reconcile " Genesis and Geology " than he ; " Moses 
describes vegetables to have been created on the third 
day, but animals not until the fifth. Hence, about 
one-third of the fossiliferous rocks, reckoning upwards, 
or these deposited during the first three days, ought 
to contain only vegetables. Whereas, animals are 
found as deep in the rocks as vegetables : nay, in the 
lowest group, nothing but animals has yet been 
found." f 

Although plant-remains have been found in lower 
beds since the above was written, it is still true that 
nothing but animals have yet been found ill the lowest 
beds ; and no geologist imagines that fruit-trees existed 
till millions of years after the appearance of animal 
life, while such grass, herbs, and fruit-trees as we are 
now familiar with, which the writer of the first of 
Genesis evidently meant, did not come into existence 
until a recent geological period : yet many of our 
existing plants, and even fruit-trees, were in existence 
long before man made his appearance. That the herbs 
and fruit-trees, represented as created on the third day, 
were these now existing, is evident from the fact, that, 
in the 29th verse, God is represented as giving them 
to man and beast for food. 

Hugh Miller wishes to make us believe that this 
third day's works is represented by the fossil plants 
of the carboniferous period ; but, when he forgets his 

* Gray and Adams's Elements of Geology, p. 342. 
t Hitchcock's Elementary Geology (1853). 



32 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

theology, he tell us, that in the carboniferous period, 
" so far as appears, neither flock nor herd could have 
lived on its greenest and richest plains: " nor does even 
the succeeding flora, that of the oolite, " seem to have 
been in the least suited for the purposes of the shepherd 
or herdsman. Not until we enter on the tertiary 
periods do we find floras amid which man might have 
profitably labored as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of 
fields, or a keeper of flocks and herds." Our principal 
fruits, he informs us, were only introduced " a short 
time previous to the appearance of man," and the true 
grasses scarcely appear in a fossil state at all. " They 
are peculiarly plants of the human period." * Again 
he says, the plants of the carboniferous period are, 
" save in size and bulk, a poor and low flora after all. . . . 
We fail to meet a single dicotyledonous plant on which 
an herbivorous mammal could browse ; . . . not a single 
fruit have we yet found good for the use of man." 

To say, then, that this third day's creation refers to 
the plants of the carboniferous period is to do the 
greatest violence to fact, as his own statement, made 
when the necessity of harmonizing the facts of geology 
with the fictions of Genesis was not present to his 
mind, abundantly proves. 

Long ages before our grasses, herbs, and fruit-trees 
existed, the seas so swarmed with mollusks that their 
shells made rocks thousands of feet in thickness ; fishes 
of varied forms dwelt in the waters ; reptiles as bulky 
as young whales peopled the ocean, and swarmed on 
the land ; huge birds fished in the tepid waters, and 
beasts roamed over the land in search of their prey : 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 78. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 33 

but of all these, and of the immense ages during which 
they existed, this Genesical cosmogonist knows, of 
course, nothing at all, and consequently says nothing. 

If God created the plants of the carboniferous 
period on the third day, who created those of the 
oolitic period, which are entirely distinct from those 
of the carboniferous, not one species being common 
to both. If they were created without the necessity 
of God saying any thing, why could not those of the 
carboniferous, which are decidedly inferior to them, be 
made without God's speaking ? But the plants of the 
early tertiary are distinct from those of the oolite, and 
those of the present from those of the early tertiary, 
each formation having characteristic forms. And 
who made all these ? and why was God silent, in his 
account of creation, about the most important portions 
of his work ? 

ic And Grod said, Let there be lights in the firmament 
of the heaven to divide the day from the night ; and let 
them be for signs and for seasons and for days and 
years ; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the 
heaven to give light upon the earth" "And Grod made 
two great lights ; the greater light to rule the day, and 
the lesser light to rule the night : he made the stars also. 
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give 
light upon the earth." — 14th, loth, 16th, and 17th 
verses. 

Nothing in this whole account so strikingly dis- 
plays the ignorance of the writer as this. The earth 
has existed for three days, a solitary body in the uni- 
verse ; light is created, evening and morning, day and 
night are established ; even grass, herbs, and fruit- 
trees called into existence; and now the sun, moon, 

3 



34 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

and stars are made for the especial benefit of the 
earth, when nearly all that they could do for it has 
been miraculously accomplished without them. The 
sun is to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night: 
but what the stars were for, the writer seems to have 
been unable to conjecture, so he merely says, " the stars 
also ; " for the words " he made " have no corre- 
sponding words in the Hebrew. Five days were spent 
by Omnipotence in making this little world and its 
organized existences; and in a part of one day thous- 
ands of millions of suns were created, — some of them 
much larger than our sun, while that is more than a 
million times larger than the earth, — and this appar- 
ently with a very slight effort. Nearly a week in mak- 
ing and adorning this dew-drop world, and a boundless 
ocean of stars poured out at a breath, and dismissed 
with the careless remark, " the stars also." Could 
this writer have had the most distant idea of the 
hundred million suns, that we call stars, which are 
visible through a powerful telescope ? No man who 
had ever looked through one could have written in 
that fashion. 

God made them, and " set" them in the firmament 
of the heaven. They were not " set," then, when they 
were first made : this was an after-work. Where were 
the sun, moon, and stars, before they were " set " in 
the firmament of the heaven ? This firmament, we 
must remember, divides the waters that are above from 
the waters that are on the earth (7th verse). But 
the waters above are held in the clouds : the firmament 
which separates between the water in the clouds and 
that in the seas must, therefore, be below the clouds. 
And since the clouds in fine weather are only five or 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 35 

six miles high, the firmament of heaven, when most 
distant from the earth, cannot be more than five or 
six miles above the level of the sea ; and the sun, 
moon, and stars, being "set" in it, cannot be at a 
greater distance : and when the clouds are lower, as 
they are in dull weather, the sun, moon, and stars 
cumot be near as far from the earth even as that ; so 
that in balloons we might readily visit them ! All the 
Bible writers, indeed, seem to have regarded the stars 
as shining points, and confounded them with the 
meteors, whose shining track is so frequently seen on 
the evening sky. 

Just two days before the creation of man, sun, 
moon, and stars are created, according to this writer ; 
and yet in the Pottsdam sandstone, at the base of the 
Silurian formation, deposited ages before man's ap- 
pearance, we find slabs of rock on whose surface are 
sun-cracks and ripple-marks, demonstrating the ex- 
istence of sun and moon, and showing the operation 
of both. 

On the fifth day, God is represented as saying, 
" Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving crea- 
tures that have life, and fowl that may fly above the 
earth, in the open firmament of heaven" — 20th verse. 

How indefinite is all this ! And it is not the inde- 
fmiteness of knowledge, which desires to relieve the 
reader of the burden of detail which greater definite- 
ness might produce ; but it is the indefiniteness of 
ignorance, which, for want of knowledge, cannot make 
itself understood, even by a multiplicity of words. 
"The moving creatures that have life" include, of 
course, mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, and all 
animals below them, for they all have life, and move ; 



36 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

but this is not what the writer meant, or he would not 
have represented a separate creation of birds, beasts, 
and men. What, then, did he mean ? In Gen. vii. 21, 
the same word, sheretz, translated here, " moving crea- 
ture," is translated " creeping thing," and evidently 
refers to reptiles. In Lev. xi. 10, the same word is 
employed to signify all mollusks, articulates, and radi- 
ates of the water : u Whatsoever hath not fins and 
scales in the seas and the rivers, of all that swarm in 
the waters [all the sheretzim of the waters], they shall 
be an abomination unto you." In the same chapter, 
29th and 30th verses, the weasel, mouse, tortoise, 
ferret, chameleon, lizard, snail, and mole, are called 
" sheretzim of the land." In the 41st and 42d verses 
of the same chapter, the word is again used : " And 
every sheretz that creepeth on the earth shall be 
an abomination unto you ; it shall not be eaten : 
whatsover goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth 
upon all four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all 
creeping things that creep upon the earth." &heretz 
here includes serpents, worms, snails, and flies, spiders, 
myriapods, and crustaceans, because they have more 
than four feet. What a medley ! — radiates, mol- 
lusks, articulates, reptiles, weasels, mice, ferrets, and 
moles, but not rats, squirrels, or beavers. The use 
of terms so indefinite in their nature shows the com- 
plete ignorance of the writer on all matters relating to 
zoology. Taking the definition of the word given, as 
Christians generally believe, by God himself, on the 
fifth day were created invertebrate animals, including 
mollusks, crustaceans, and insects, and fishes, reptues, 
birds, small mammals, and great whales, since in the 
21st verse we are told that God created on the same 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 37 

day great whales ; or, one day before man's appearance 
on the planet, shells, insects, fishes, reptiles, birds, and 
whales were created. Every geologist knows that 
such a statement is nearly as incorrect as words can 
make it. All these forms of life existed for immense 
periods of time before man. We find fossil shells as 
low as the base of the Silurian formation, fishes in the 
upper Silurian, insects in the Devonian, reptiles at 
the base of the carboniferous formation, birds in the 
oolite, small mammals in the lias, and whales in the 
cretaceous. I need tell no person, who is at all fa- 
miliar with geology, that even the most recent of these 
formations is separated from man's first appearance by 
more than a million years. 

But the record teaches that these various forms 
were all made on the same day, or, according to the 
would-be harmonizers, in the same period. But this 
statement is equally false. Mollusks and fishes, that 
are here placed together, are separated geologically by 
a time sufficient to lay down the whole of the lower 
Silurian rocks, which are, in several places, miles in 
thickness; shells and great whales, which are repre- 
sented as created on the same day, have no less than 
six grand geologic periods intervening ; and, even if we 
consider, as some harmonizers do, that tanninim, the 
word translated " great whales," should have been 
translated " sea-monsters," and, therefore, refers to the 
sea-reptiles of the Jurassic period, there would still be, 
separating them from the earliest shells and crustace- 
ans, the enormous period necessary to lay down four 
intervening geologic formations. 

The record also teaches that shells, crustaceans, 
fishes, birds, and whales were created two days after 



38 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

grass, herbs, and fruit-trees. Had they been created 
as near together as this, it would, of course, have been 
impossible for the geologist to tell which came first. 
But it is quite certain that shells, crustaceans, and 
fishes were in existence long before there were any 
fruit-trees ; and, before such fruit-trees existed as we 
are now familiar with, all these forms of animal life 
existed for immense ages, and were in the greatest 
abundance. 

No man strove more than Miller to reconcile the 
teachings of geology with the statements of Genesis ; 
yet he is constantly compelled to acknowledge what is 
in deadly conflict with them. Of the oldest organic 
period, the Silurian, he says, " It seems to have been, 
for many ages together, a creation of mollusks, corals, 
and Crustacea. At length, in an upper bed of the sys- 
tem, immediately under the base of the old red sand- 
stone, the remains of the earliest known fishes appear. 
The rocks beneath this ancient bone-bed have yielded, 
as I have already said, no trace of any plant higher 
than the thallogens, or, at least, not higher than the 
zosteracea, — plants whose proper habitat is the sea." * 
Shells, corals, and fishes existed, then, when the high- 
est land-plants were sea-weeds ; but it was long after 
this before reptiles, or great whales, or birds, ap- 
peared. 

On the sixth day, God said, " Let the earth bring 
forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and 
creeping thing, and beast of the earth, after his kind.' 1 
And, apparently towards evening of that day, God said, 
"LeFus make man." — 24th and 26th verses. 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 90. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 39 

We have here the last day's work, — cattle, creeping 
things, beasts, and men. Less than six thousand years 
ago, cattle, creeping things, beasts, and men, first 
came into existence. Is this correct ? In no sense. 
First, the order is wrong : it should have been creeping 
tilings, beasts, cattle, and men. But why introduce 
creeping things, when reptiles had already been in- 
cluded in the fifth day's work ? This Genesical cos- 
mogonist is so loose a writer, that it is difficult to say. 
He may have included aquatic reptiles in the she- 
retz which " the waters brought forth abundantly ; " 
and reptiles may be meant by the creeping things 
created on the sixth day. With either meaning, it was 
a mistake to put creeping things after cattle, and be- 
fore beasts ; for land reptiles existed as early as the 
carboniferous period, and cattle not before the ter- 
tiary, and even the earliest small pouched mammals 
of the trias were two geological periods more recent 
than the earliest land reptiles. Reptiles preceded birds ; 
other beasts preceded cattle, or ruminating mammals ; 
while reptiles, beasts, cattle, and men, here said to 
have been created on the same day, or same period 
according to the harmonizers, are separated geologi- 
cally by enormous periods of time. Reptiles, carbon- 
iferous ; first mammals, or beasts, trias ; first cattle, 
miocene tertiary; and first men, pliocene tertiary. 
Miller ranges vertebrates chronologically in the follow- 
ing order: first fishes, next reptiles, then birds, then 
marsupial mammals, and lastly true placental mammals, 
ages before man.* 

In Genesis, we have first, cattle, reptile, beast, man ; 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 119. 



£0 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

second, beast, cattle, reptile, man. In geology, fish, 
reptile, bird, beast, cattle, man. Between the first 
reptile and first known mammal or beast is nearly the 
whole of the carboniferous period, and the entire Per- 
mian ; and between the first reptile and the first man, 
six grand geologic periods. The man who can recon- 
cile the statements of the first chapter of Genesis with 
the teachings of geology would find no difficulty in 
reconciling the story of " Sinbad the Sailor " with the 
facts of geography. 

" So God created man in his own image, after his 
own likeness." — 27th verse. 

Then God must be in the image of man. Is it pos- 
sible that this could have been the meaning of the 
writer ? I think there can be no doubt of it in the 
minds of those who can look at the matter in an un- 
prejudiced light. In the fifth chapter and first verse, 
which was probably written by the same hand, we 
read, " in the likeness of God made he him."^ He 
certainly did not mean that man was made in the 
moral or spiritual likeness of God y for this would be to 
make man God also ; but his physical frame was simi- 
lar to that of the form of God. God, then, — Jehovah, 
the God of the Jews, — was in the image of a man : he 
had, as the Bible writers teach us, eyes, nose, mouth, 
lips, loins, bowels, and hair ; he breathed into man's 
nostrils, he spoke, he walked, he wrestled, " came 
down " and showed Moses a part of himself. The 
Jewish Jehovah was simply a magnified man, some- 
times visible, but generally invisible ; and the infirmi- 
ties of men seem to have marked him as strongly 
as they did the men who made him. Nature, I need 
hardly say, knows no such monster : the rocks bear no 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 41 

witness of him ; the heavens reveal no such idol, and 
display none of his handy-work ; nor does the earth 
any of his day's work. Geology can find as much 
evidence of Jove or Brahma in the various formations 
as of Elohim or Jehovah. 

But man was made, according to this statement, less 
than six thousand years ago. This is as far from 
being correct as the rest of the statements of this 
singular chapter. Baldwin .says, " It is now as cer- 
tain as any thing else in ancient history, that Egypt 
existed as a civilized country not less than five thous- 
and years earlier than the birth of Christ." * But 
this is nearly one thousand years before the creation 
of man, according to Genesis ; yet Egypt was then a 
civilized country. 

Lenormant, in his " Manual of the Ancient History 
of the East," though anxious to make his readers be- 
lieve that the Bible and history are in perfect harmony, 
acknowledges that " undoubtedly, positive facts prove 
that the antiquity of man on the earth is much greater 
than has been inferred from an inexact and too narrow 
interpretation of the Biblical narrative." f He places 
the first dynasty of Egyptian kings at 5004 B.C., or 
one thousand years before the creation of man, accord- 
ing to Genesis. J He acknowledges that the same 
system of writing existed then that was in use thous- 
ands of years afterward, § and that there are no indi- 
cations of any interruption produced by a deluge, 
which, according to the writer in Exodus, covered the 
tops of all mountains, and destroyed all life on the dry 
land, yet never disturbed the Egyptians ! 

* Prehistoric Nations, p. 32. t Manual, p. 39. 

% Manual, p. 197. § Ibid, p. 205. 



42 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

Sir Charles Lyell * gives us a period of more than 
a hundred thousand years from the present, for the 
time when the primitive men of Prance lived, whose 
remains have been found in the valley of the Somne, 
with those of extinct elephants, lions, bears, hyenas, 
&c. Ansted, in his " Earth's History," says, "It 
would appear that the lowest human remains must be 
of a date carrying us back a quarter of a million of 
years." f Page tells us, " There is the amplest evi- 
dence of man having been an inhabitant of Western 
Europe for ages preceding the popularly received 
chronology." J 

But the popularly received chronology is that of the 
Bible, founded on the statements in Genesis ; and, when 
the one falls, the other cannot stand. Man, according 
to Lyell, Ansted, and Page, — men pre-eminent in geo- 
logical ability and carefulness of statement, — was on 
the planet many thousands of years before the earth 
had an existence, according to the writer in the first 
chapter of Genesis. 

Broca, the anthropologist, says, " Man has left traces 
of his existence, marks of his industry, and remains of 
his body, in geological strata, the antiquity of which is 
beyond computation." He adds, " A person may easily 
convince himself that six thousand years constitute 
but a short moment in the life of humanity." § 

Lesley says, " My own belief is but the reflection of 
the growing sentiment of the whole geological world, 
— a conviction strengthening every day, as you may 

* Antiquity of Man, p. 204. 

f Earth's History, p. 185. 

X Man: Where, Whence, and Whither, p. 183 

§ Anthropological Review, 1868, p. 47. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 43 

with little trouble see for yourselves by glancing 
through the magazines of scientific literature, — that 
our race has been upon the earth for hundreds of 
thousands of years." * 

Adam proves to be a very recent production, created 
by some unknown Jewish writer, and takes his place 
with King Arthur, Captain Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, 
and other fictitious characters. 

By what possibility can we account for the present 
varieties of the human race, supposing them to be all 
descended from a pair created but six thousand years 
ago ? The author of " Man iir Genesis and Geology," 
though writing to harmonize science and Scripture, 
acknowledges that " the unchanged appearance of 
leading types of mankind, as far back as we can trace 
these in history, requires a considerable extension of 
time to account for their origin, provided we adhere to 
the physiological unity of the race. Upon Egyptian 
monuments that date back from one thousand four 
hundred to two thousand years before Christ, the negro 
is depicted with color and features as marked and 
characteristic as he exhibits at this day. When did 
this type originate, which has remained unchanged for 
more than three thousand years ? If the type itself was 
a gradual product of time, how much time, before the 
date when it begins to appear upon Egyptian monu- 
ments, was necessary to establish its marked and un- 
varying features ? According to a tablet of Sethos 
I., the Egyptians divided mankind into four principal 
races, — the Eed (Egyptians), the Yellow (Ammon- 
ites), the Black (Negroes), and the White (Lybians), 

* Man's Origin and Destiny, p. 66. 



44 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

If all mankind were descended from a single pair, — 
and again, if the whole peopled earth was destroyed 
by the flood, with the solitary exception of the family 
of Noah, — how much time was required to originate 
peculiarities of race, which can be traced back without 
variation through the whole known course of history ? 
In the present state of scientific knowledge, this whole 
subject is wrapped in obscurity." * 

Had it been a Hindoo sacred book, instead of a 
Christian one, that declared that the first human be- 
ings were created six thousand years ago, and that all 
their descendants, except one family, were destroyed 
by a flood a little more than four thousand years ago, 
Dr. Thompson would not have found any thing 
" wrapped in obscurity." He would have said, " The 
fabulous character of these pretended sacred narratives 
is apparent at a glance ; and it is inconceivable how men 
of intelligence can accept for truth such impossible 
stories." 

But the facts stated by Dr. Thompson are not nearly 
as serious as some that may be told. In the fifth 
Egyptian dynasty, in the reign of King Pepi, inscrip- 
tions were made which represent the " negroes " u as 
immediately adjoining the Egyptian frontier." f Yet 
this dynasty is placed by Lenormant at from 3703 B.C. 
to 4235 B.C. The negroes were in existence, then, 
more than a thousand years before the Deluge, and 
even before the biblical time of the creation of man ; 
for Pepi ruled near the commencement of this dynasty. 
Can any thing more clearly indicate the utter falsity 



* Man in Genesis and in Geology, p. 101. 

f Lenormant's Manual of the Ancient History of the East, p. 211. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 45 

of the Genesical story, than that its believers and 
advocates are compelled to acknowledge such dama- 
ging facts as these ? 

Gliddon tells us that it is " asserted by Lepsius, and 
familiar to all Egyptologists, that negro and other races 
already existed in Northern Africa, on the upper Nile, 
2300 B.C." * But this is only forty-eight years after 
the Deluge. What color was Noah ? What were his 
sons like ? How could they in forty -eight years form 
" races " which have continued for four thousand 
years ? 

But Lepsius f also tells us that African languages 
were in existence as early as B.C. 3893 ; but this 
takes us within one hundred and eleven years of 
the creation of man. What language did Adam 
speak ? 

Again Lepsius says, " We are still busy with struc- 
tures, sculptures, and inscriptions, which are to be 
classed, by means of the now more accurately deter- 
mined groups .of kings, in an epoch of highly flourish- 
ing civilization, as far back as the fourth millenium 
before Christ. We cannot sufficiently impress upon 
ourselves these hitherto incredible dates. The more 
criticism is provoked by them, and forced to serious 
examination, the better for the cause." J 

But this is within four years of the Bible date of 
creation. And yet this does not carry us back to the 
first Egyptian kings, as we have already seen. And 
when we arrive at Menes, the first king of Egypt, Dr. 
Thompson acknowledges that " we find already an 
empire consolidated from previous distinct govern- 

* Types of Mankind, p. 181. j- Ibid., p. 86. \ Ibid., p. 60. 



46 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

merits, and capable of building the great city of Mem 
phis, with its magnificent temples and towers, and its 
huge dyke that turned the course of the Nile." * 
And prior to all this, and long prior, was the " stone 
ages" of Egypt, of which, says Wilson, " we detect 
evidences, old as the date of their civilization appears."! 
Quite recently, indeed, weapons in abundance, belong- 
ing to this early Egyptian period, have been found. 
Six thousand years is but as yesterday, compared with 
the length of time that man has been on the globe, 
existing, too, as races differing as widely from each 
other as they do to-day. 

" Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and 
all the host of them, and on the seventh day Grod ended 
his work which he had made ; and he rested on the seventh 
day from all his work which he had made" — 2d chap. 
1st and 2d verses. 

When was the earth finished ? When did the rivers 
cease to run, the glaciers to slide, the waves of the 
ocean to heave ? When did the wheels of the universe 
stop, that God might rest ? Ever the sun shines, the 
rain falls, the rivers flow, the cataract leaps, the waves 
dash ; sediment is swept down by innumerable streams 
to fill the ocean depths, and lay the foundation of con- 
tinents yet to be; earthquakes shake, and volcanoes pour 
out lava-streams now, as all these agents operated mil- 
lions of years ago. Geology teaches clearly, that, just 
as the world was being made in the ages past, so is it 
being made to-day ; and, if God was at work then, he is 
equally at work now. But the God that this writer 



* Man in Genesis and Geology, p. 100 
f Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, p. 41. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 47 

believed in was evidently a large man, who worked 
with muscles, stood off to see the effect as a sculptor 
might do, and could not refrain from an exclamation 
of delight as he saw the result of his labor ; who be- 
came fatigued on Friday evening, after such an arduous 
week's work, and needed Saturday for repose ; which 
repose the author of Exodus assures us refreshed him 
(Ex. xxxi. 17). 

Looking at the account of creation as given in the 
first chapter of Genesis, and the first three verses of 
the second chapter, we see, that, when compared with 
the teaching of geology, every entire statement that 
is made is false. No man can take a single sentence 
in the account in its connection, and show its harmony 
with the revelation of science ; and, had it been the 
cosmogony of any other sacred book than the Bible, 
such men as Miller, Hitchcock, Buckland, Guiyot, 
Pye Smith, Dana, and Dawson, who have wasted 
their time in trying to perform the impossible, would 
have considered it a disgrace for any geologist to 
demean his science by attempting to harmonize its 
teachings with such childish statements. 

Present it to us as the speculation of some early 
writer, who strives with his limited knowledge to con- 
ceive how the universe came into its present condition, 
and we can, of course, accept it as such, and treat it 
accordingly : then the geologist will no more apol- 
ogize for the discrepancies between his science and 
Genesis than the geographer because he has found no 
such country as Brobdignag and Liliput, or the his- 
torian because his history of the East does not agree 
with the statements in the " Arabian Nights' Enter- 
tainments." 



48 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

Taking the views that were held by the people 
generally at the time the story was written, we can 
see how the writer came to make it as we find it. 
The earth was then regarded as the most important 
body of the universe ; the stars were shining points, 
and the sun and moon about as large as they look to 
be : and the whole account reflects this view. The 
earih being the largest and most important body, in 
the writer's estimation, the most time must be given 
to it : hence, Omnipotence spends five days in making 
our planet and its inhabitants, but makes the rest of 
the universe, compared with which the earth is less 
than one of the invisible atoms comprising the air 
we breathe, in a single day. He makes the earth be- 
fore the sun, moon, and stars, because they are so 
much less than the earth, and are only made to admin- 
ister to it. He shrinks from having his God work in 
absolute darkness, so he has the production of light as 
the first operation of creative power after the produc- 
tion of the earth. He does not make light proceed from 
the sun, and form the day, because he did not know 
that the sun was the cause of the day, but supposed it 
to hold the same relation to the day that the moon 
does to the night ; for he says, " the sun to rule the 
day, and the moon to rule the night," the sun no more 
producing the day than the moon does the night. 
The firmament, in which the sun, moon, and stars are 
" set," must, of course, be made before the bodies 
which are to be set in it ; and since the firmament holds 
up an ocean of water, — necessary, as he supposed, to 
account for rain, — before the firmament was made, 
that ocean of water must have been upon the earth ; 
hence " the deep," spoken of in the second verse. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 49 



Provision must now be made for the living creatures 
that are to dwell upon the earth. The first thing of 
necessity is the formation of dry land ; without it 
plants could not exist, and animals could not, therefore, 
subsist upon them. This thought, in the mind of the 
writer, leads to the first part of the third day's work, 
— the gathering together of the waters, and the forma- 
tion of the sea and the dry laud. Some have won- 
dered that plants should be represented as being 
created in the third day, and the sun not till the 
fourth. There is, however, no difficulty, when we con- 
sider the opinions of the writer. Day and night were 
in existence, an ocean of water had been elevated 
above the firmament, so that light and water for the 
use of plants could be readily supplied ; the dry land 
was there, and he very naturally finishes the day's 
work by making grass, herbs, and fruit-trees. They 
must be made before the animals that are to feed upon 
them, and he could find no better time to make them 
than this. It was a matter of indifference when the 
sun, moon, and stars should be created ; and the writer, 
having concluded to finish with the creation of man, 
gives us, as the fourth day's work, the creation of the 
heavenly bodies. Then very naturally follows the 
creation of fishes, birds, and beasts, all being prepared 
for them, and man last, as God's most perfect work, 
and needing all that had been previously done. 

The carelessness of the writer, and the utter absence 
of all scientific accuracy in his arrangement, is evident 
from the fact that the order in which God calls for the 
appearance of living forms is not always the order in 
which they are said to have appeared. Thus God 
gays, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving 
i 



50 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

creature that hath life (sheretz), and fowl ; but God 
created great whales (tanninim), never mentioned in 
the call, then every living creature that moveth which 
the waters brought forth abundantly, and lastly fowls. 
God says, " Let the earth bring forth the living crea- 
ture after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and 
beast of the earth after his kind ; " but they are repre- 
sented as being made in very different order. God 
made first the beast of the earth, then cattle, and 
lastly creeping things. In the command, it is cattle, 
creeping thing, beast ; in the creation beast, cattle, 
and creeping thing. 

The errors of omission in this account of creation 
are nearly as great as its errors of commission. It 
says not a word of the original fiery condition of the 
earth, or of its gradual cooling, resulting in the up- 
heaval of the land and the formation of the mountain 
chains. It consequently says nothing of the gradual 
development of the continents, of the gradual increase 
of land-surface from one geological period to another, 
but represents the present land-surface of the globe 
as made in one day and by one miraculous act. 

It says nothing of the immense age of the earth, 
which is essential to enable us to understand the 
operation of the causes that brought it into its present 
condition, and, in the absence of this, accounts by 
miracle for what we now know to have been the 
product of law, operating during periods of adequate 
extent. 

Dana says, " We assume that the forces in the world 
are essentially the same through all time ; for these 
forces are based on the very nature of matter, and 
could not have changed. The ocean has always had 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 51 

its waves, and those waves have ever acted in the same 
manner. Running water on the land has ever had 
the same power of wear and transportation and 
mathematical value to its force. The laws of chemis- 
try, heat, electricity, and mechanics, have been the 
same though time." * Hitchcock agrees with him : 
" The same general laws appear to have always pre- 
vailed iii the globe, and to have controlled the changes 
which have taken place upon and within it. We 
come to no spot, in the history of the rocks, in which 
a system different from that which now prevails ap- 
pears to have existed." f 

The same general laws, and the forces in the world 
always the same, that must have been done by law, 
and gradually, which is represented in Genesis to have 
been done at once, and by miracle. 

It is silent regarding the innumerable species of 
animals and vegetables which existed and perished 
before the present species came into existence ; these 
forms regarding which it is silent having been, without 
doubt, much more numerous than those at present 
existing. Of these Hitchcock says, "There have been 
upon the globe, previous to the existing races, not less 
than five distinct periods of organized existence ; that 
is, five great groups of animals and plants, so com- 
pletely independent that no species whatever is found 
in more than one of them, have lived and successively 
passed away before the creation of the races that now 
occupy the surface. Other standard writers make the 
number of these periods of existence as many as 
twelve." J Who created all these ? 

* Dana's Manual of Geology. Introduction, p. 7. 
t Religion of Geology, p. 20. J Ibid., p. 22. 



52 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

There is no mention of the processes by which miles 
of sedimentary rocks composing the earth's crust 
have been deposited, nor of the fossils imbedded in 
them, — texts in the earthly scriptures pregnant with 
such important meaning to those who properly study 
them. 

It does not inform us concerning man's gradual de- 
velopment from so rude a beginning as our recent 
archaeological and geological discoveries demonstrate ; 
and his gradual brain-development, as indicated by his 
constantly improving skull, and the consequent ad- 
vance in art and science, during a period that can only 
be rudely estimated at hundreds of thousands of years. 

It does not inform us of the different centres of 
animal and vegetable life ; every continent and large 
island having living forms that are peculiar to it, which 
could not have been the case had the accounts of crea- 
tion and the Deluge been true. 

It manifests the most entire ignorance of all the 
great facts of astronomical science ; does not speak 
of the motions of the heavenly bodies, nor even of that 
of the earth, which produces day and night; but other- 
wise accounts for them by a bungling and altogether 
unnecessary miracle. 

In short, it evinces in every verse the absolute 
ignorance of the writer on the subject that he professes 
to teach ; and it would be easier to harmonize with the 
revelations of science the Hindoo cosmogonies, given 
in their sacred writings : they at least give us time, 
so essential in the operation of nature. 

If the account of creation and development that 
geology gives is true, then this account in Genesis can- 
not be. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 53 

Genesis teaches that the world was made Jess than 
six thousand years ago : geology and astronomy that 
it came into existence many millions of years ago. 

Genesis asserts that the entire universe was made in 
six days : geology proves that our planet has been in- 
calculable ages in arriving at its present condition. 

Genesis teaches that the earth was in existence three 
days before the sun, moon, and stars, and that these 
were made less than six thousand years ago : astron- 
omy and geology demonstrate that the earth could not 
have been in existence before the sun, and that the 
sun, moon, and stars must have existed for incalculable 
ages. 

Genesis testifies that God created the firmament on 
the second day, that this firmament divided the waters 
which were under from those that are above, and that 
on the fourth day the sun, moon, and stars were set in 
it ; and that this took place within six thousand years : 
science reveals to us that no such firmament exists, 
that the atmosphere divides the waters above from 
those beneath, as it has done for an incalculable period, 
and that the heavenly bodies are not set in it, and never 
could have been. 

Genesis declares that grass, herbs, and fruit-trees 
were the first created organic existencies, and that 
they were created three days before man and one day 
before the sun : geology proves that corals, shells, 
crustaceans, and fishes existed long before grass, herbs, 
and fruit-trees; that grass, herbs, and fruit-trees were 
on the earth long before man, but could not have been 
in existence before the sun, which shone on the lifeless 
globe for ages. 

In Genesis, we read that great whales, fishes, and 



54 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

birds were made on the same day, and this one day 
before man's creation : geology teaches that fishes were 
here long before fowls, fowls long before whales, and 
all these ages before man. 

Genesis says that cattle, creeping things, beasts, and 
man were all made on the same day : geology, that 
creeping things were here millions of years before 
beasts, beasts before cattle, and all these long before 
man. 

Genesis represents man as having been made less 
than six thousand years ago, in the image of God : 
science teaches that man has been here for a much 
longer time, and that the early man was in the image 
of the brute, and has grown into his present manly 
appearance. 

Although there is not a single statement in this 
Genesical account of creation that is absolutely true, 
when taken in its connection, there are some truths 
incidentally told, — that is, they may be gathered from 
the narrative, but they are such as any one might have 
supposed. 

The first is, that there was a time when no life ex- 
isted upon the earth. 

Second, plants and animals were produced before 
men. 

Third, there was dry land before plants grew upon 
it. 

Fourth, fishes and birds were in existence before 
beasts. 

It would be difficult to find in any document, ancient 
or modern, as many affirmative statements and as little 
truth as in this narrative. 

" But geologists declare that there is the most perfect 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 55 

harmony between the teachings of Genesis and geology, 
Dana says, ' The record in the Bible is, therefore, pro- 
foundly philosophical in the scheme of creation which it 
presents. It is both true and divine. It is a declaration 
of authorship, both of creation and the Bible, on the first 
page of the sacred volume? " * 

And yet Dana, though he tells us that the Bible 
record is true and divine, and that the Author of crea- 
tion is the author of the Bible, says that the account 
of creation in Genesis " is brought out in the simple and 
natural style of a sublime intellect, wise for its times, 
but unversed in the depths of science which the future 
was to reveal. The idea of vegetation, to such a one, 
would be vegetatiou as he knew it ; and so it is de- 
scribed."! But what becomes of the divinity of the 
author ? Was the "Author of creation " unversed in 
the depths of science which the future was to reveal ? 
The author of Genesis, according to Dana, mistook the 
sea-weeds of the Silurian period for the grass, herbs, 
and fruit-trees of the recent tertiary, — a mistake that 
no boy of ten years of age and of ordinary intelligence 
could make. Did God know no better than that ? 
Or did his inspiration fail to save Moses from making 
such a gross error ? What, then, was it worth ? If it 
did not save him in this instance, which we have dis 
covered, how often did it fail where we have no means 
of discovering ? If Moses blundered in reference to 
earthly things, with which he was familiar, how can 
we trust his statements about heavenly things, of 
which he knew nothing ? If the Bible has failed so 
utterly to give to a single human being an accurate 

* Manual of Geology, p. 746. f Ibid., p. 744. 



56 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

knowledge of the creation of the earth, may it not 
have failed as utterly in its descriptions of God, devil, 
heaven, hell ? And when science walks into the do- 
main theological, as it must, will it find the Bible 
statements on these subjects just as false? and will there 
be as much need of pettifogging, that would disgrace a 
tenth-rate lawyer, to harmonize its theological state- 
ments, as there is now to harmonize its geological ? 
No doubt. 

Yes, Dana is right, when he says that the author of 
the account in Genesis was " unversed in the depths 
of science." He was not even versed in its shallows : 
every statement he has made proves it; but how that 
account can be true and divine which is thus acknowl- 
edged to be false, it, perhaps, requires an intellect 
versed in the depths of orthodox theology to discover. 

He says, " A Deity working in creation like a day- 
laborer, by earth-days of twenty-four hours, resting at 
night, is a belittling conception, and one probably 
never in the mind of the sacred penman." It is, 
indeed, a belittling conception, but the probability is 
altogether in favor of its being in the mind of the pen- 
man, sacred or otherwise. If God was never fatigued, 
how could he rest ? And what necessity was there for 
a day of rest ? How could he, as the writer of Exodus 
asserts, rest and be " refreshed ? " Was this, too, written 
in the " simple and natural style " of an intellect 
" unversed in the depths of science ? " It looks very 
much like it, and, indeed, so does the whole book. 

But what are we to think of those geologists, who, in 
the light of the facts of their science, assure their 
readers that the account in Genesis is " profoundly 
philosophical," " true and divine," at the same time 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 57 

acknowledging that it is no such thing ? What kind 
of an example do such professors set before the young 
men in college, who look up to them for guidance, and 
regard them as models ? Is it any wonder that chi- 
canery, sham, lies, and hypocrisy abound in society, 
when our students are brought up under the instruc- 
tion of such men as these ? One of the greatest evils 
inflicted upon us by the popular orthodox view of the 
Bible is the special pleading, hypocrisy, and even 
wholesale lying, which it engenders. The consequences 
to society, the wreck of conscientiousness and manli- 
ness, are fearful to contemplate. 

It is refreshing to meet with an honest, outspoken 
man like Lesley, who says, " There is no possible al- 
liance between Jewish theology and modern science. 
They are irreconcilable enemies. Geology, in its 
present advancement, cannot be brought more easily 
into harmony with the Mosaic cosmogony, than with 
the Gnostic, the Vedic, or the Scandinavian." * 

" But Hugh Miller harmonized Genesis and geology." 

If you had said he tried, and, failing, put an end to 
his life, you would have been much nearer the truth. 

Miller's explanation is, that God presented a series 
of visions of creation to Moses, as u successive scenes 
of a great air-drawn panorama," f or " a diorama, over 
whose shifting pictures the curtain rose and fell six 
times in succession." God, then, undertook to teach 
Moses by a panorama or diorama, constructed for this 
purpose, Moses being the only spectator, how the work 
of creating the heavens and the earth was accom- 



* Man's Origin and Destiny, p. 45. 
f Testimony of the Rocks, p. 196. 



58 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

plished. Moses, however, led away by appearances, 
supposed that to have been done in six days which 
was millions of years in being accomplished ; for Miller 
acknowledges that " there is nothing more probable, 
however, than that even Moses himself may have been 
unacquainted with the extent of the periods represented 
in the vision ; nay, he may have been equally uncon- 
scious of the actual extent of the seeming days by 
which they were symbolized." * 

That is, they seemed to be days, and he took them 
to be days. 

He thinks the first scene presented to Moses was 
that of the azoic period, the first day ; second, the 
Silurian and Devonian periods ; third, the carbonifer- 
ous period ; fourth, the Permian and triassic periods ; 
fifth, the oolitic and cretaceous periods ; and, sixth, the 
tertiary period; each scene corresponding to each day's 
work. 

Since the azoic period includes the whole time up to 
the production of life, it includes the vast ages, probably 
longer than all the time that has transpired since, 
during which the earth was so intensely heated as to 
shine in the heavens like a sun. The panorama opens 
with the shoreless fiery sea of this period, the most 
striking thing that could be presented, yet Moses never 
mentions it. Could the artist have neglected to insert 
it ? He observes, when the world has cooled suffi- 
ciently, the expanse of waters and the cloudy sky, and, 
the sun being invisible, he supposes it is uncreated ; and 
what light he beholds he thinks was created by mira- 
cle, — an error the proprietor of the panorama never 
corrected. 

* Testimony of the Rocks, p. 206. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 59 

From the second scene, corresponding with the 
Silurian and Devonian periods, he fancies that a solid 
firmament was created*, which lifted up a large ocean 
of water and held it over the earth ; but he never sees 
the radiates, the mollusks, some of which, such as the 
orthoceratites, were sixteen to twenty feet long, whose 
remains have made rocks thousands of feet in thick- 
ness, in the Silurian formation ; he never notices the 
fish, bony-plated monsters, that swarmed in the ocean- 
deep of the Devonian ; he beholds not the plants, 
which, before the close of the Devonian, had attained 
the size of respectable trees. All these, which no 
modern artist would leave out of his panorama, the 
divine artist unaccountably neglected to represent ; or 
did he fail sufficiently to illumine the scene, so that 
Moses could behold it, or was Moses so careless that he 
did not notice them while that portion of the panorama 
was passing ? At all events, of these he says not one 
word. 

When the curtain uprises on the third day, Moses 
beholds the great carboniferous forests of the coal 
measures, — miles of tree-ferns with their feathery 
tops, reed-like calamites over immense marshes, lepido- 
dendrons with their scaly trunks and hairy branches, 
and the columnar sigillaria, forming together such a 
scene as mortal man never beheld before ; but Moses, 
poor man, thinks he sees the grasses and herbs on which 
the sheep and cattle of Midian fed, and the vines, fig- 
trees, date-trees, melons, cucumbers, and grains of 
Egypt, and, as soon as the curtain drops, writes this 
terrible blunder for the benefit of the ignorant millions 
yet to be born. It would have been well if the ex- 
hibiter had made some verbal explanations as the 



60 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

panorama unrolled, or looked over the notes of his 
solitary spectator. It might have suggested improve- 
ments before the next exhibition to some Moses of 
another planet. 

On the fourth day, represented by the Permian and 
trias, the sun shines out clear and warm, as Miller is 
pleased to imagine, for the first time. Moses is so 
dazzled that he sees nothing else during the whole 
day ; and, in the evening, he beholds, also for the first 
time, the moon and stars. Not having seen these 
heavenly bodies before, he fancies they were just made, 
and writes, " on this day God made sun, moon, — the 
stars also." During these two periods (Permian and 
trias), immense and strange reptiles moved over the 
land, fish innumerable swarmed in the waters, birds as 
high as young giraffes stalked along the shores, and 
even small mammals fed upon the insects that teemed 
in the tropical forests ; but of all these, Moses, so 
blinded by excess of light, sees nothing, and conse- 
quently says nothing. 

On the fifth morning, Moses observes what had 
escaped his notice for three days, — the waters alive 
with fish ; he sees, too, the aquatic reptiles that he had 
not observed on the preceding day, and he now sup- 
poses them to be great whales : he still fails to see the 
land reptiles ; but the birds, that he did not see yester- 
day, he observes, and then writes down, at the con- 
clusion of the day's performance, " great whales, other 
water animals, and fowls created this day." Another 
sad mistake. 

The curtain rises for the sixth and last time, and 
reveals a perfected world ; and Moses again supposes 
that what he sees, and had not previously observed, 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 



61 



must have been created on that day, and writes, " cat- 
tle, beasts, creeping tilings, and men created this day," 
though creeping things and beasts had been presented 
before. 

But how did Moses obtain his idea of what was done 
on the seventh day ? Did the curtain rise, and show 
the Creator resting upon a flowery bank after his 
arduous week's work ? 

If any such " panorama " or " diorama " was pre- 
sented to Moses, it was a most signal failure. Never 
did panorama so belie its name and derivation. It so 
utterly failed in every instance to indicate accurately 
what was done, that Moses mistook its meaning every 
time, and not a human being on the planet had the 
slightest conception of what was meant by it, till geol- 
ogy raised the curtain of the ages to some purpose ; for 
the dumb rocks revealed what the talking Elohim, 
even by the aid of a panorama, could not accomplish. 

Great names lead people to imagine they see wisdom 
in the most childish and nonsensical things, or Hugh 
Miller's pretended explanation would have been blown 
to atoms in the storm of ridicule it would have created. 
The Gods turning showmen, and to such poor purpose, 
surpasses even the freedom with which Homer treats 
the Grecian divinities. 

But Genesis furnishes us with a second account of 
creation, differing very widely in many respects from 
the first. This commences with the fourth verse of the 
second chapter, and introduces us to another Creator, 
Jehovah, who is here styled Lord God. 

" These are the generations of the heavens and of the 
earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord 
Ciod made the earth and the heavens, and every plant 



62 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

of the field, before it to as in the earth, and every herb of 
the field before it grew : for the Lord God had not caused 
it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till 
the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, 
and watered the ivhole face of the ground. — Gen. ii. 
4, 5, 6. 

Here there is no such mistake as making the earth, 
and day and night, and evening and morning, before 
the sun ; but there are errors nearly if not quite as 
grave. The heaven and the earth are made at the 
same time, the earth destitute of all organic existences, 
waiting for the Omnipotent Mechanic to furnish them : 
which he does in a very ungodlike manner ; for he 
makes every plant before it is in the earth, and every 
herb before it grows. The writer of the first account 
of creation was a natural poet ; the organ of ideality 
in his brain must have been comparatively large. We 
read his account, and we imagine the profound dark- 
ness, that the aching eye strives in vain to pierce ; we 
can hear the Master's voice, that nothing can disregard, 
" Light be," and see the flashing glory that shoots 
across the illimitable sea of darkness, and reveals the 
chaotic earth beneath us. Again we hear, " Let the 
earth bring forth grass, herbs, and trees ; " and, as 
the omnific word resounds, the naked earth starts into 
life and beauty at a bound, a wave of living green 
rolls round the globe, and on a thousand hills the 
lordly pines their nodding branches rear: false enough, 
but still poetic. But the writer of the second account, 
poor, narrow-headed bungler, has God, mechanic-like, 
make oaks, elms, palms, and pines, and stick them in 
the ground; and, then, lest they should fail to grow, 
he makes a mist to water the whole face of the 
ground. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 63 

This writer has plants and herbs made before any 
form of animal life. We have seen how contrary this 
is to the revelations of geology. In addition to this, 
it had not rained upon the earth up to the time of 
the production of plants and herbs. This we know to 
be a great mistake. I have in my cabinet " Devonian 
rain-prints." They are common in the carboniferous 
formation ; and yet both were deposited ages before 
our present plants came into being. The first writer 
shrank from telling how God made man. He knew, 
that, in doing so, he must certainly take that fatal step 
from the sublime to the ridiculous. The second writer 
has no such scruples : hence he says, — 

" And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, 
and man became a living soul. — 7th verse. 

If a man wishes to obtain a conception of the silliness 
of this narrative, let him try to actualize this process 
of man-making. Where did this take place ? In 
Egypt, where the raw material is so abundant ? Did 
Jehovah mix it to a proper consistency for sticking 
together by the application of water, so large a pro- 
portion of which enters into the composition of human 
bodies ? Did he mould it into a human form as a 
sculptor does his clay model ? Did he use his fingers 
merely, or had he tools specially adopted to the pur- 
pose ? When he breathed into his nostrils, did he 
place his mouth to the nose of the clay man, and did 
this transform the clay into flesh, blood, bones, muscles, 
sinews, nerves, and brain ? Let this story be told to 
any scientific man for the first time, and would he not 
laugh at it, and regard it as he would " Jack and the 
Bean-stalk " ? Of course he would. And is this story 



64 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

any better for being old or long-believed, or because 
an unknown, ancient Jew tells it, and people in the 
days of the world's ignorance swallowed it ? 

According to the Elohistic writer of Genesis, God 
made man on the sixth day, male and female ; and 
doubtless the Jehovistic writer intended to have 
the two sexes made on the same day, though not at 
the same time ; but in his ignorance gives Adam a job 
that must have taken several days to accomplish, 
before Eve, " the mother of all living," was formed. 

" And out of the ground the Lord God formed every 
beast of the field, and every foivl of the air ; and brought 
them unto Adam, to see what he would call them : and 
whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that ivas 
the name thereof. And Adam gave* names to all cattle, 
and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the 
field. — 19th and 20th verses. 

The Elohistic writer makes birds on the fourth day, 
and beasts on the fifth, both before man ; but the 
Jehovistic makes man first, then birds and beasts. 
The species of birds are estimated by ornithologists at 
eight thousand ; the known land mammals or beasts 
are very nearly two thousand. These are all made 
out of the dust of the ground, then brought to Adam, 
who names them. Let us realize the magnificent con- 
ception of this writer ! Out of the ground Jehovah 
makes two pairs of ponderous elephants ; for there 
are two species, the finest proboscidian pachyderms 
the world ever beheld. He leads or drives them to 
Adam. Adam says Asiatic elephant to the one, 
Indian elephant to the other, or something just as 
good ; and away they march to the nearest wood, 
which must have been at no great distance. Jehovah 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. G5 

now finishes, and calls Adam's attention to, fourteen" 
splendid rhinoceroses, — for there are seven species, 
— ripping up the bushes with their horns as they 
walk along. Adam, endowed with miraculous wis- 
dom, gives appropriate names to every species ; and 
away they go to the nearest river, which must have 
been convenient. Next come a host of bears, black, 
brown, white, grizzly, cinnamon, growling till Adam 
names and permits each to go to its congenial home. 
But here is a difficulty : the grizzly bear belongs 
to America. How shall it reach its proper place 
of abode ? The white bear can only live in the vicin- 
ity of the sea, and in a high northern region. Did 
Jehovah carry or send the animals to their appropriate 
places after Adam had named them ? If so, the 
amount of work done on this day must have been 
enormous. The gorilla and the chimpanzee to Western 
Africa, the orang-outang to Borneo and Sumatra, the 
spider-monkeys to South America, the buffalo and 
opossum to North America, a hundred and thirty 
pouched mammals to Australia, wingless birds to New 
Zealand, rheas to Patagonia, and an innumerable 
multitude besides, — all to be conveyed to their respec- 
tive places of abode, where, as geologists know, simi- 
lar animals have existed for ages. 

Unless the animals were conveyed from the spot as 
soon as Adam named them, think what the conse- 
quence must have been. Besides the inappropriate 
temperature to which many animals must have been 
subjected, how long would some of these animals 
e^ist in the presence cf others ? An immense mena- 
gerie, in which lions, tigers, sheep, wolves, rabbits, 
hyenas, eagles, rats, cats, mice, pigeons, hawks, buz- 

6 



66 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

zards, vultures, condors, fowls, cormorants, owls, 
crows, geese, ducks, swans, swallows, king-fishers, 
penguins, ostriches, and thousands of others, are all 
turned loose ! How long would the herbivora live 
that had been made and named, unless an extra num- 
ber had been produced ? And, if an extra number 
was produced, then the amount of labor on that 
remarkable day must have been much greater ; and all 
this done before Eve was created. If each one was 
made in Jehovah's dust-shop, brought to Adam, and 
named in one minute, — and certainly there could have 
been no idle time under such circumstances, — then it 
took over one hundred and sixty-six hours to do it ; 
and if Jehovah and Adam worked for ten hours a day, 
— and they did not probably work longer, before 
Avarice was born to drive the toiler, — then they were 
sixteen days and six hours in doing the work, during 
which time Adam was the sole human occupant of the 
globe. 

The beasts and birds could not, of course, remember 
the names that Adam gave them ; it would have been 
utterly useless to name them, unless some one did 
write them down, or remember them ; hence Adam 
must have written down or remembered the ten thou- 
sand names given to all beasts and birds : but Adam 
was naked, destitute of pen, ink, and paper ; and he 
must, therefore, have remembered them. But, to re- 
member them, his memory must have been a miracu- 
lous one ; yet of what possible use was it ? 

This story is not more ridiculous than false. Beasts 
and birds existed as early as the oolite at least, and 
during every succeeding geologic period, representing 
untold ages, to man. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 67 

" And the Lord Grod said, It is not good that the 
man should be alone : I will make him an helpmeet for 
him. And the Lord Grod caused a deep sleep to fall 
upon Adam, and he slept ; and he took one of his ribs, 
and closed up the flesh instead thereof: and the rib 
which the Lord Grod had taken from man made (or, as 
it reads in the margin, he builded) he a woman, and 
brought her unto the man" — Gen. ii. 18, 21, 22. 

Was not Jehovah aware that it would be bad for 
man to be alone when he made him ? Was not the 
necessity just as great for a helpmeet when he was first 
created as at any future time ? 

But why did this writer represent man as first cre- 
ated, and woman as an after-thought, — a help to man, 
only necessary because man could not be comfortable 
without her ? We can readily find the spirit that in- 
spired him, in the disposition that the stronger sex 
among all barbarous and semi-barbarous nations has 
Iiad to trample upon the rights of the weaker. We 
may see the influence of the same unholy spirit in the 
curse pronounced upon woman, put by this writer 
into the mouth of Jehovah, "Thy desire shall be to 
thy husband, and he shall rule over thee ; " and in the 
foolish and brutal command of Paul, " Let the woman 
learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not 
a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, 
but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then 
Eve " (1 Tim. ii. 11-13). What a reason ! Had 
this domineering, self-styled apostle but studied science 
half as much as he had old Jewish traditions, he would 
have learned that the best of every thing has ever been 
the most recent; and, if woman was the last made, it 
is good evidence that she is superior to man. If woman 



68 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

had written the Bible, how different all this would 
have been ! 

The making of man was ridiculous enough ; but the 
making of woman is still worse. Adam cast into a 
deep sleep, mesmerically, anaesthetically, or otherwise, 
— and a very deep sleep it must have been, — Jehovah 
opens his side, — whether with his finger, a knife, or 
some surgical instrument, we are not informed, — takes 
out one of his ribs. Was the vertebra attached to it, 
and that transformed into the skull ? Does he hold 
the bloody rib in his hand ? or does he lay it on the 
ground, and say " Abra-ca-dabra hi presto change," 
and in an instant does the crooked, gory bone become 
a fair, erect, and lovely woman ? As likely so as not, 
taking this story for truth. And then Adam wakens to 
find the desire of his soul gratified ; and, having named 
so many animals, the habit is now strong in him, and 
he says, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of 
my flesh : she shall be called woman because she was 
taken out of man." But how he knew what took place 
while he was in a deep sleep we are not informed. 
Possibly Jehovah communicated it to him in a private 
conversation ; or did he discover that a rib was lack- 
ing, and surmise the rest ? 

God having created man and woman by miracle, — a 
God, too, who is altogether independent of law, — what 
splendid specimens of the race they must have been ! 

" The loveliest pair 
That ever yet in love's embraces met : 
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born 
His sons ; the fairest of her daughters, Eve." 

As Miller says, " Adam, the father of mankind, was 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 69 

no squalid savage of doubtful humanity, but a noble 
specimen of man; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, 
but exquisitely lovely beyond the lot of fallen humani- 
ty." And this is reasonable. Made in the image of 
God, turned out of his own workshop, — the work in- 
trusted to no apprentice or even journeyman, — they 
must have been the most magnificent and beautiful 
pair that ever trod the earth. And their intellectual 
capacity must have been in harmony with their physi- 
cal perfection. The one indeed necessarily accompa- 
nies the other. No curse was pronounced on man's 
intellect in consequence of the fall : it seems rather to 
have increased his intelligence. Of his children, one 
becomes a shepherd and the other a farmer ; very hon- 
orable pursuits, and both indicating a position far in 
advance of the savage state. In the seventh genera- 
tion from Adam, which could not have been more than 
three hundred years, we find his descendants living in 
tents, playing on harps and organs, and working in 
brass and iron (Gen. iv. 16-22). 

What says archaeology of the condition of man at an 
early period of his history? It is now well known, 
that in every country where stone, copper, tin, and 
iron are found, that man in his development has passed 
from a primitive barbarous condition through the ages 
of stone, bronze, and iron, in each of which his weap- 
ons and utensils have been made of these materials ; 
and each of these ages has continued for many thou- 
sands of years. 

Of the " primeval Briton," Daniel Wilson, professor 
of history in University College, Toronto, says, " Intel- 
lectually, he appears to have been in nearly the lowest 
stage to which an intelligent being can sink. Morally, 



70 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

he was the slave of superstitions, the grovelling character 
of which can be partially inferred from the indications 
of his sepulchral rites. Physically, he differed little 
in stature from the modern inheritors of the same soil; 
but the form of skull indicated diverse ethnical rela- 
tions. His cerebral development was poor; his hands, 
and probably his feet also, were small ; while the 
weapons with which he provided himself for the chase, 
and the few implements that ministered to his limited 
necessities, disclose only the first rudiments of that 
inventive ingenuity which distinguishes the reason of 
man from the instincts of the brutes." * 

Of the stone period, during which these primeval 
Britons lived, he says, " We are furnished with satis- 
factory evidence of a thinly-peopled country, occupied 
by the same tribes, with nearly unchanging habits, for 
many ages." f Were these wild savages that for ages 
inhabited Great Britain the descendants of Adam and 
Eve, between Cain and Tubal Cain, that had wandered 
off from Asia to the British Isles ? The mouldiest theo- 
logical fogy will hardly take such a position. 

" However our pride may revolt at the fact, we are 
forced to acknowledge that man, as he stepped at first 
upon this part of the earth (Prance), bore, in his in- 
stincts, his passions, and his wants, no small resem- 
blance to the brutes. Fire was still unknown to him: 
his teeth show that he drew his nourishment from roots 
and other growths of the soil ; and, when he began to 
use flesh for food, he must have devoured it raw. . . . 
A skin, stripped from the beasts he had slain, formed 
the clothing of the primeval European. His limbs were 

* The Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, p. 40. | Ibid, 301. 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 71 

exposed to the inclemencies of the weather ; and when 
he would seek rest or protection from the cold, or from 
wild animals, his necessary resort was to the forest, or 
to dark cavities in the earth." * Here is no Adam, 
the most perfect man ; no Abel, keeping sheep ; no 
Cain, building a city ; no Tubal Cain, shaping brass 
and iron. 

Could the descendants of Noah have forgotten all 
the arts practised by them at the building of Babel's 
tower, and sunk into such savages as these ? The pe- 
riod when they existed is too ancient, if other consid- 
erations did not forbid. 

The calculations of the Swiss archaeologists indicate 
that men inhabited Switzerland from six to seven 
thousand years ago, who used polished-stone imple- 
ments.! Could these have been descended from a pah- 
created long after they were in existence ? Yet we 
know that this people that used polished-stone weapons 
were preceded by a ruder people, who used unpolished- 
stone weapons ; and there is good evidence to show 
that they existed for an immense period. The paleo- 
lithic-stone age, as it has been termed, is now acknowl- 
edged by most archaeologists to be of tens of thousands 
of years duration. The skulls belonging to this period 
generally indicate small mental capacity, and are ac- 
companied with prognathous jaws, which must have 
made their ■ possessors as ugly as they do the brutal 
savages of Australia to-day. 

This G-enesical story represents man in the full pos- 
session of language : from the first, Adam and Eve un- 
derstood all that God said, and they spoke as appro- 

* Smithsonian Report, 1867, p. 336. 
t Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, p. 320. 



72 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

priately to him as lie did to them. But how could a 
man understand a language before lie had heard it 
spoken. And how could he utter sentences before he 
had spoken words ? Did Jehovah practise school-teach- 
ing as well as panorama-showing, — certainly quite as 
creditable a business, — and give Adam and Eve at least 
the rudiments of the Hebrew language ? In the very 
nature of things, language must have grown from the 
simplest beginnings to the condition in which we find 
it among the most ancient nations ; and this is the 
opinion generally, if not universally, entertained by the 
students of language at the present time. Their views 
are expressed in " Chambers' Encyclopedia ; " article, 
philology. " Every thing tends to show that language 
is a spontaneous product of human nature, — a neces- 
sary result of man's physical and mental constitution." 

If every thing tends to show that language is a spon- 
taneous product of human nature, then every thing 
tends to show the falsity of the Bible account of Adam's 
naming the animals, and of his conversations with 
God and his wife, when there could have been no time 
for the natural formation of a language. 

" The first rudiments of language," says the philol- 
ogist, John Crawford, " must have consisted of a few 
articulate sounds, in the attempts made by the speech- 
less but social savages to make their wants and wishes 
known to each other ; and, from these first efforts to 
the time when language had attained the complete- 
ness which we find it to have reached among the 
rudest tribes ever known to us, countless ages we 
must presume to have elapsed." 

The writer of the second account of creation repre- 
sents the serpent as condemned to walk upon its belly, 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 73 

in consequence of its having tempted Eve to eat of the 
forbidden fruit. It is evident, then, that the serpent 
must have walked in some other way previous to this 
curse. But geology reveals to us the existence of the 
serpent, similar in its form to that of the present time, 
as earlj as the eocene tertiary. If the serpent, millions 
of years before the creation of man, moved as serpents 
move now, it is evident that their present mode of 
progression cannot have been produced by any curse 
of Jehovah. 

This writer also represents the death of human beings 
as a result of the curse pronounced upon them in con- 
sequence of their disobedience. The New Testament 
indorses the statement: "By one man, sin entered 
into the world, and death by sin " (Rom. v. 12). " By 
man came death " (1 Cor. xv. 21). But if this was the 
case, if Adam had not sinned, his body would have been 
immortal. No fires could have burned him, no floods 
have drowned him, no poison affected him, no accident 
injured him ; for, if he could be injured, a repetition 
of injuries of sufficient extent would have injured him 
beyond recovery. Gunpowder could not have harmed 
him ; or, if a bomb-shell could have blown him to pieces, 
his constitution must have been such that the scattered 
pieces would instantly return, and make the man whole. 
He must, indeed, have been as impenetrable and as in- 
destructible as an ultimata atom. But how could a 
human being, constituted as we are, be so different in 
his capacities ? No flesh-and-blood man could this 
have been. And this explains the whole mystery. 
Adam never had an existence, save in the brain of 
the Hindoo dreamer who originally created him, 
and the people who have since then believed in what 



74 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

the Hindoo created and the Jewish eosmogonist ac- 
cepted, and, with some modifications, foisted upon the 
Jewish people, and subsequently on the Christian. He 
is a mythical man, and could, therefore, be and do what 
the Bible states as readily as Hercules could bring the 
three-headed dog from the infernal regions, and Atlas 
support the world upon his shoulders. 

" But the Bible was never intended to teach men 
science" 

The Bible does, however, profess to tell, and very 
definitely, how the world was made ; and, if it is not 
done scientifically, it must be done falsely. 

Suppose a man should undertake to tell where the 
important organs of the body are situated, and he in- 
forms us that the heart is under the right arm, the 
stomach under the left, and the liver at the back of the 
neck ; and, when you bring up these gross blunders, ho 
answers, " Oh, I did not intend to teach physiology ! " 
You reply, " You undertook to tell where the impor- 
tant organs of the body are situated, and this you 
could only do by stating the facts as physiology states 
them;, and, failing to do this, you made gross misstate- 
ments." So we say of these accounts in Genesis : the 
writers undertook to tell the order in which the heav 
ens, the earth, and its varied organic existences, came 
into being ; ml<I, failing to do this geologically, they did 
it falsely. 

" God dealt ictih the Jews as with children : he spoke 
of things^ Tiot as they existed, but as they appeared. 
What could the ignorant Jews have hiown of the Silu- 
rian and Devonian periods, the ichthyosaurus and the 
ramphorhynchvs ? How could they have credited the 
revelations of ffest^gy, if they had beez maSe to them? 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 75 

TJie world would never have received such a revela- 
tion* 

But what intelligent father would treat his children 
in such a manner as that ? A father wishes to convey 
to his children a knowledge of the form of the earth. 
It appears to be flat. They cannot understand how per- 
sons can live on the other side of it, if they are told 
that it is round ; and, in short, they never could receive 
such a statement. So he says, " My dear children, the 
world on which we live is flat, — flat as the table from 
which you eat your dinner." What a foolish father that 
would be ! His children will learn the facts some time, 
and then they must despise him. But what better is 
Jehovah ? The delicate Jewish stomach could not bear 
the truth, so he fed them on falsehoods ; gave them to 
understand that the earth was the largest and most 
important body in the universe ; told them that grass, 
herbs, and fruit-trees came into existence before the 
sun, and that there were three evenings and mornings 
before the sun was created ; told them that it had not 
rained upon the earth till just before man's appear- 
ance, and that all things were created less than six 
thousand years ago ; well knowing that all this was 
false, and that science would some day make it mani- 
fest. If a revelation from God can only perpetuate 
the errors of the people to whom it is given, it had 
better not be given ; for it then gives the highest pos- 
sible sanction to error, and prevents the discovery of 
truth. Had it not been for these Genesical fables, we 
should have been much farther advanced in geological 
knowledge to-day. 

* See Miller's Testimony of the Rocks, pp. 191, 192. 



76 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

" But the Bible, to give a full scientific description 
of the creation of the ivorld and its inhabitants, must 
have been as large as a mountain; and no man could 
have read it in a life-time" 

It is not necessary that its description should be full: 
it might be correct, and no longer than it is at present. 
Suppose that it had read something like this, — how 
differently scientific men would have regarded it. 

1. Millions of ages ago, the heavenly bodies and the 
earth came into being, — the sun many times larger than 
the earth, which turns over and revolves around it ; 
and thus day and night and the seasons are produced. 

2. At a very early period in the earth's history, it 
was a fluid mass of matter, exceedingly hot, and sur- 
rounding it was a very large atmosphere. 

3. In process of time, the earth became cool enough 
for a rocky crust to form upon its surface. 

4. As yet, there was no water on the earth ; but it 
continued to cool till the water condensed upon its sur- 
face from the great atmosphere above : the hollows of 
the earth were filled and the oceans came into being. 

5. For vast ages, rain fell from the clouds upon the 
dry land, and rivers carried down sediment into the 
seas, at the bottom of which it was laid, where it 
hardened in time into rocks many miles in thickness. 

6. At first, the land-surface of the earth was small ; 
but, as the earth continued to cool, its crust contracted, 
hills and mountains were produced, and continents 
gradually formed. 

7. Life began in the ocean, simple forms of animals 
and vegetables side by side together. 

8. And the waters brought forth abundantly, — 
corals, living in stony habitations, jointed animals 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 7< 

with shelly coverings, and mollusks that clung to the 
rocks, fed on the sea-weeds, and swam by myriads in 
the waters. 

9. They grew and multiplied for such a vast period, 
that their remains, at the bottom of the seas, made 
rocks thousands of feet in thickness. 

10. Then the waters brought forth fishes, — strange 
fishes with bony coverings, — new corals, shells, and 
jointed animals; and, on the dry land, moss-like plants 
and ferns grew ; and, by the river-side and in the 
marshes, reeds sprang up. 

11. Creeping things also made their appearance, and 
reptiles crawled and hopped over the ground*. 

12. Multitudes of trees sprang up, so that the dry 
land and the marshes were covered. Perns and reeds 
and club-mosses, tall in stature, grew and fell ; and their 
bodies made, when covered with sediment, beds of coal, 
fuel for the coming days. 

13. And all the early forms of life perished one by 
one, and one by one new forms took their places ; and 
life appeared in successively higher forms from age to 
age. 

14. Birds of strange forms, some of them very rep- 
tile-like, abounded, many of them of gigantic size. 

15. Mammals appeared, but they were at first small 
in size and few in number ; and gigantic sea and land 
reptiles, so that both land and water swarmed with 
them. 

16. Mammals appeared, in constantly-increasing 
numbers and of larger size, from age to age ; and the 
land was everywhere occupied by them. 

17. Man at last came into being, low and brutal, 
and slowly advanced to a more perfect form. 



78 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

18. The world is still progressing ; and the future will 
find it greatly superior as an abode of human beings. 

This is, of course, but the imperfect account of a 
fallible man, from a necessanly imperfect understand- 
ing of the geological record ; aiui yet it is vastly supe- 
rior in accuracy to the account is Genesis. What a 
perfect account might have been written by the infal- 
lible God ! an account that would have carried con- 
viction to the minds of millions, and the strongest 
conviction to the most scientific ; becoming stronger 
and clearer as our knowledge of the earth's past history 
increased. 

But, if the account of creation given in Genesis is 
false, then the commandments said to have been given 
to Moses on Mount Sinai, which indorse that account, 
never came from God ; and the Pentateuch is a merely 
human production, of no more authority than the ac- 
count of creation itself. But, with the Pentateuch, 
away go all the Old-Testament books ; for they indorse 
it, and argue from it. It is impossible that the spirit 
of truth could have inspired men to build upon and 
indorse the terrible falsehoods of the Pentateuch. But, 
when the Old Testament is gone, how much of the 
New remains ? Jesus appeals to the Old Testament, 
urges his claims on the strength of its statements ; and 
the evangelists and apostles everywhere recognize its 
authority as fully as our orthodox ministers do to-day. 
All that we can do, then, in the light of absolute fact, is 
to accept the Bible only as the statements of men, in 
many cases lamentably ignorant of what they pretend- 
ed to teach, and of no more authority than the writ- 
ings of Mohammed or Joseph Smith. 
" But what harm does it do to believe these old records? 



THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 



79 



They have comforted the souls of countless millions : 
why disturb our peace with these new ideas ? ,! 

Is falsehood, then, as good as truth ? Is it equally 
beneficial to the soul ? Then welcome the dark ages I 
burn our libraries, close our schools, shut up our halls, 
and let us set up the statue of a hog, and make that, 
henceforth, our God. If nothing is to be disturbed 
that comforts people, how wrong Christian missionaries 
act, who are constantly disturbing the comfortable 
faiths of the heathen among whom they operate ! 

We are here to discover the truth on all possible sub- 
jects ; to teach it, to live it, receiving the blessing of 
that angel which feeds man's soul with appropriate 
food, strengthens his faculties by applying them to 
noble purposes, crowns his days with that delight which 
universally springs from well-doing, and assures him, 
when this life is over, of a life of continued progress 
hereafter.^ 

We have been too long bound by the pretended rev- 
elations of this Jewish story-book. It has led us to 
believe in an angry, cruel, and revengeful God ; an 
almost omnipotent Devil, and an unending hell of 
misery unutterable. We have spent our time in har- 
monizing its contradictions, in comparing its discrep- 
ancies, and seeking to evade their significance ; in 
treasuring its rubbish in our souls, as the credulous Cath- 
olics hug to their breasts chips of dirty wood for frag- 
ments of the true cross, and in making it a stumbling- 
block in the way of our advancement in knowledge. 
Thanks to science, the Bible now takes its true posi- 
tion, — a record of man's religious notions in a time of 
ignorance ; henceforth, every man deciding for himself 
what it is worth, and using it accordingly. All that ia 



80 THE IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS. 

true in it will still remain, and be more acceptable 
when dissociated from the fables and filth that have 
done so much to obscure it. The night of gloom and 
superstition will pass away, and the sun of science 
bless the world" with his reviving beams. 



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Priee $1.50. 



IRRECONCILABLE RECORDS; 

OK, 

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(Third Edition.) 
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